Crow’s Row

by Julie Hockley

  “You’ll grow into them,” reassured Griff.

  It wasn’t so bad at first. I spent my time with Rocco and Griff. We moved from the gym to the pool to the kitchen to the TV. I watched from the sidelines while Griff taught Rocco how to fight and wrestle. Griff would even let Rocco practice his punches on Griff’s face. Griff chuckled every time Rocco’s fist connected with his face, and I hid my face in my hands.

  “Iron jaw,” he told Rocco and me, slapping his own cheek. “That’s how I was able to keep my title so long. I let ’em hit me till they get too tired or cocky. When they start making mistakes, I attack and finish them off.”

  Rocco was a captive audience to Griff’s fighting tales.

  One afternoon, we even started up a game of football with some of the other guards. Griff found ways to play on the position opposite from mine so that he could tackle me; though I was able to outrun him and most of the other guys. Rocco found this hilarious.

  “You don’t run like a girl,” he praised. It was one of the nicest things anyone had ever told me.

  I was being well entertained, and it worked … for a short while. But I wasn’t sleeping. I spent my nights rolling around in bed, annoying Meatball or wandering aimlessly in Cameron’s room, looking out the windows at the dark nights or looking over my brother’s fake ID, which I had leaned against my ballerina lamp.

  Every day I waited, anxiously, and the more time that passed, the more I started withdrawing from Griff and Rocco and everyone else. I didn’t want to be entertained anymore. I started to go off by myself, trying to find a small space where I could be alone; that was what I was doing when Rocco found me in the library curled up with a book. He lumbered in with a bag of Cheetos and plopped himself on the opposite couch. We sat in silence while he crinkled the bag and crunched away. He got up, picked up a book, and leafed through it, leaving orange fingerprints behind. He threw it next to him, put his feet on the coffee table, sighed, took them back down, repeatedly threw a pillow up in the air and caught it—more orange fingerprints.

  Then all the noise stopped. When I glanced over my book, he was looking at me. “What’s going on between you and my brother?” he asked me.

  Heat rose up my neck. “Nothing,” I stammered, caught off guard. “Why do you ask?”

  “I have my reasons … and you look like you’re about to slit your wrists,” he observed.

  “Where’s Griff?” I asked, looking for a change of subject.

  He shrugged. “Dunno. Still sleeping I guess.”

  I wasn’t surprised. Griff had become a man of leisure, taking well to life at the farm without the bosses.

  “He’s too old for you,” Rocco opined.

  “Who? Griff?” Griff had also taken to following me around, which made my quest to be alone very difficult.

  “No. My brother.”

  “Cameron’s not too old for me!” I half-shouted, too quickly. I tried to recover by adding, “Isn’t he only twenty-six?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, and how old are you?”

  Eighteen. No, nineteen. When was my birthday again? I had to trace back a few months to the day I had gotten a birthday card in the mail, the exact day of my birthday—someone had planned it well. The card was signed “Love, Mom and Dad,” in Maria’s handwriting, and had a check stuffed in it. The check had been endorsed by my father—that was something, right? Except that the numbers were in Maria’s handwriting again—the hearts over the i’s gave her away. Maria had been far too generous with the zeros after the double digits. It didn’t matter in the end. I tore the check up and threw it away. “Nineteen,” I settled.

  “Oh.” Rocco looked deflated.

  “How old are you?”

  He seemed to think about this. “Eighteen.”

  “What year were you born?”

  He was stalled and when he couldn’t respond fast enough, “Fine. I’m sixteen.”

  I couldn’t tell if this was true or not. It didn’t really matter. “Shouldn’t you be in school right now?” I sounded like someone’s mother. Not like mine, though.

  Rocco shrugged. “I can’t go back.”

  “Why not?”

  “I got in a fight because of a girl.”

  This was starting to sound familiar. “I thought you couldn’t fight?”

  “I didn’t win,” he told me. “I won’t go back until I know I can beat the other guy, one way or another.”

  I suddenly understood why Rocco was bent on growing up so fast. “What happened to the girl?”

  He chuckled slightly. “She felt sorry for me, so she stuck around for a while.”

  “That was nice of her.”

  He shook his head. “Not really—she hooked up with my mom’s boyfriend. They stole our TV before they left.”

  I couldn’t hide my shock. He chuckled again. “I couldn’t wait to get rid of my mom’s boyfriend. I just didn’t think I would lose the TV too.”

  We slipped back into silence. I tried to go back to my book. There was another long exhalation. “What’chu reading?”

  I put my book down. “Philosophy.” I had found a whole shelf dedicated to ancient philosophers—worn books, many of which I had already read in my first-year philosophy class.

  “What’s that?”

  “Philosophy? Aristotle. Plato. Descartes. Rousseau. Ethics. I think, therefore I am.”

  There was a blank look on his face.

  “It’s the rational investigation of existence, truth, beliefs, all that stuff.”

  He looked even more confused.

  “It’s supposed to help you understand why we are the way we are … why we do the things we do … why we think the way we think.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Humans.”

  “Oh,” he said and went back to his bag of Cheetos.

  More days passed. Some days it seemed like tending to Meatball’s needs was the only reason I ever left Cameron’s room. Other days, I would just lounge around the house in my pajamas all day. The insomnia was getting to me.

  In the middle of the night, I heard my door squeak open, and then it proceeded to slowly squeak shut again. I opened my eyes to see a tall figure in the moonlight that was leaving the room and closing the door behind him.

  Chapter Ten:

  About Taking Risks

  “Cameron?” I was so confused, and I was so tired. I was sure my eyes were playing tricks on me, making me see what I wanted to see most.

  After a dazed second, I turned the switch of my ballerina and confirmed the apparition.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you,” he whispered.

  “I wasn’t sleeping,” I confessed.

  A rush of joy—and relief—filled me. I was suddenly wide awake and energized, but I kept my composure, as far as I knew.

  Cameron stood on the threshold, debating. When he made up his mind, he advanced to my bedside. He looked like he had been dragged to hell and back. His clothes were crumpled and he had dark circles under his eyes; he was his other, older self.

  We stared at each other for an awkward while. I gazed up, he gazed down. His lips were pressed together tightly, and his face was hard, unreadable.

  It upset me to see him like that. Whatever he found in my face displeased him too.

  “You haven’t been sleeping,” he accused.

  I shrugged innocently and wiped my hair away from my face. A speckle of warmth reached his eyes.

  He brought his hands to his face and rubbed it with exhaustion. When he reappeared, the warmth had spread to the top of his cheeks, and his shoulders had seemed to relax a bit, like he was slowly defrosting. I exhaled.

  “Is everyone back?” I asked him, listening for the shuffles and banging of doors.

  The house was dead quiet.

  “No. I came back early,” he admitted. “It’s just me.” He gave me a tired smile. The square of his jaw and his dark eyes stood out under the shaded light of my ballerina.

  A radiant smile escaped me before I had
time to measure it and scale it down to normal, then I took a gamble … and scooted over so that he could sit down.

  Fatigued, he took me up on my offer without hesitation. Embarrassed silence fell upon us.

  My head was propped up on my elbow, my eyes watching him; Cameron sat with his back to me, his head veering from one side of the room to the next, resting with interest on the bedside table. When he reached over, I followed his movement. My gaze reached my brother’s ID card before his hand did.

  It was too late to try to hide it, so I had to anxiously await his reaction. I was expecting to get in trouble for snooping around.

  He glanced over the picture, chuckled, and shook his head as if he remembered some private joke. I exhaled again.

  “I see you kept yourself busy while I was gone.” His voice was calm. He put the card back where he had found it and turned to me.

  “You were gone a long time,” I reminded him.

  “Yeah. Things took longer than I thought they would.”

  My arm was too tired to hold up my head. I grabbed the pillow from the other side of the bed and folded it under my head. “What kind of things?”

  “Just business stuff,” he said with a yawn.

  “Like what?”

  “Inventory, orders, negotiating prices …” He sighed. “You know … normal business stuff.”

  “I know that whatever stuff you’re involved in, there’s nothing normal about it,” I blurted. “I mean, I know that your business,” I amended with emphasis, “involves some or maybe a lot of illegal stuff.” It didn’t sound any better the second time around.

  “Oh?” He arched his eyebrows and took interest. “How do you know this?”

  In my mind, I replayed what Griff had noted to me, and tried to make it sound like it was something I would have come up with all on my own. “I’m not blind. I see the armed men walking around.”

  “That just proves that I’m taking every measure possible to keep everyone safe.”

  “From what? Lions? Tigers?”

  “… and bears,” he finished for me.

  “What about your lineup of fancy cars in the garage?” I probed. “I imagine that most of those cars were probably stolen.” Again, this was Griff talking through me.

  “Actually, none of those cars are mine.” He smiled faintly but his eyes were tensed.

  “Whose are they then?”

  He seemed to consider this. “Well, I guess they’re your cars, now.”

  “Mine?” Maybe I had misheard.

  “As next of kin,” he confirmed. “They used to belong to your brother. They’re all yours now.” He smirked and added coldly, “Bill bought those cash, special order. Nothing here is stolen.”

  I flushed, realizing that my insinuation had insulted him, more than he was letting on. “So, you’re saying that you’re not involved in any illegitimate business.”

  His face became somber. “No, that’s not what I’m saying.”

  “You deal with things like drugs, guns—” I prompted.

  “Emmy,” he implored before I could get too carried away, “please don’t take offense. But I really don’t want to talk about that with you.” His eyes locked with mine, begging.

  “Okay,” I agreed gently. I wasn’t offended. I was just happy that he had put a limit on that, and not everything all together. “How does one get into that … profession?”

  I was treading lightly, unclear as to what was off limits.

  He closed his eyes and rolled his neck and shoulders. “You mean, why didn’t I become a lawyer, or a doctor?”

  “Or an astronaut, or a philosopher,” I assisted.

  His russet eyes flashed to me. “Philosopher?”

  I bit my lip and looked away. “For example.”

  “Is philosophy even a profession?”

  I frowned and glared.

  “A lot of important people have made philosophy their life’s work.”

  “Yeah, like ten thousand years ago,” he chuckled, then stopped. “Aren’t you pre-law?”

  I didn’t remember telling him that, though I tended to be too self-conscious around him to remember anything I told him.

  “It was just an example,” I insisted.

  “There isn’t much money in that,” he told me in a protective kind of way.

  “Are you going to answer my question?” I fumed.

  “Don’t philosophers spend their days sitting around and thinking about life while they starve to death?”

  I sighed with annoyance, waiting for the prolonged rant to be over. I couldn’t expect him to understand. I was pre-law because it was the only full scholarship I could get at Callister U. I didn’t mind my law classes, my grades were good, but my father was a lawyer, and so was his father before him, and his father’s father before that. One way or another, I would be forced to follow in the Sheppard path of rectitude. That didn’t mean I had to like it.

  Cameron kicked off his shoes, lifted his legs on the bed and slid next to me. He laid his head on the pillow, laced his hands behind his head and gazed at the ceiling. “Philosopher,” he mused to himself with a chuckle.

  His closeness was enough for me to forget my aggravation. I took a deep breath, his scent becoming familiar to me. “Did you pick your profession solely based on money?”

  This brought him back to reality. “Yeah. I did.” His face was bleak.

  Oh. I blushed.

  “Do you like what you do?”

  “What do you think?”

  I wasn’t sure what I was thinking but I was thrilled that he was taking part in the interrogation. “Well, I suppose you make a lot of money doing it.”

  “Money isn’t everything.”

  He was full of contradictions—I was confused. “I thought you said you chose to do this for the money?”

  “I said I did,” he repeated. “I think you and I both know that I have more money than I know what to do with. If it were still only about money, I would have quit a long time ago.”

  “So why don’t you just stop doing it then? Take your money and get out?”

  He hesitated and looked at me with worry.

  I took a breath.

  “I’m just curious,” I whispered.

  “I know.”

  He sighed and stared at the ceiling. “I can’t just run away from it. Once you’re in, you’re in it for life. If you try to leave, people become suspicious. They think that you’re either talking to the cops or you’re changing your affiliation.”

  “Who cares what people think?”

  “People who talk, who leave, get hunted down and killed.”

  I tried as best I could to hide the shudder that was fermenting at the nape of my neck.

  Cameron yawned and swept his hand over his face again. I wondered if his weariness made him more tolerant of my questions, made him answer them without editing or sugar-coating. I felt like I was taking advantage of him—a small tinge of guilt lingered—but my thirst for information overpowered.

  “Why don’t you just run away? You have enough money to hide yourself, protect yourself, don’t you?”

  “Because they won’t just kill you. They’ll kill your family, your friends, everyone you know … then they’ll kill you. There’s no such thing as running away.”

  I gulped. “Who are they?”

  “The people I work with.” He turned his head and looked at me pleadingly. “Change of subject?”

  I let it go out of guilt but also out of relief to leave this line of questioning. Even I had to admit that it was too much information—more than I could swallow.

  I took a second and continued the interview, “Tell me about your family.”

  He smiled but his eyes were cautious. “What do you want to know?”

  Everything. “For starters, what does your mother do for a living?”

  “She drinks,” he answered promptly.

  Okay. “What about your dad?”

  He cringed and stalled. “I don’t like to talk ab
out my father.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s … not a very nice person,” he said, struggling.

  “Neither are my parents,” I said.

  “It’s not the same thing. My father’s a con artist.”

  “Can you tell me about him?” I murmured. “Please?”

  He closed his eyes. “When I lived with my mom, my dad would come strolling in every couple months with his expensive suits and big cars, while my mom and I lived in dumps. The small amount of cash my dad did give to my mom she drank away. When I went to live with my dad, I thought that things were finally going to get better. But my dad was … he wasn’t who I thought he was. His money was not his own. He hung out with rich people, pretended he had money so that he could swindle old ladies out of their money …”

  His tired voice had started trailing.

  “He must have had some money to put you through private school,” I pressed for more.

  “When I first came to live with him, he didn’t know what to do with me. Eventually though, he figured out that he could use me too. He put me in that private school and showed up once in a while with some woman who’d have money but no husband. Then he’d put on the rich, father-of-the-year act. It worked like a charm; they trusted him … he stole all their lifesavings and disappeared. The payments to the school would stop after that.”

  His voice was so faded, I could barely hear him. “What happened then?”

  “The school sent me to live in a group home.”

  “Wow.” This made me angry.

  Cameron plunged his head deeper into the pillow. “He always came back sooner or later, usually when he was getting low on cash. He’d put me back in school so that he could start the show all over again. When I got older, the cops assumed that I was his partner in crime, ’cause he kept coming back to find me, and I was the only one the women could identify. I turned fourteen, my dad disappeared again, and I got thrown in juvi when I couldn’t tell the cops where he was hiding. That’s when I met Spider, and we cooked up a plan to sell drugs to the rich kids I went to school with. Within a month of getting back from juvi, I was making my own payments to the school and never had to depend on my dad’s stolen money again.”