Seven Crow Stories

by Robert J. Wiersema

  “Baseball,” he said.

  Both of them glanced at their mother, but the conversation barely seemed to register with her.

  “Okay,” Andrew said, getting to his feet. Martin ruffled his hair as he walked past, and his brother pushed his hand away playfully.

  The first pitch was a ball, and Billy stepped back from the plate, knocked the bat against his cleats, stretched, sighed. Martin glanced back at Andrew, who offered him a thumbs-up. He began to regret not bringing him to games before this: he seemed to be enjoying it, and it was kind of nice to have someone out there to cheer for him.

  He watched the next pitch. Another ball, high and outside.

  When he looked back at his brother, the man in the black leather jacket, the man from the park, was standing next to him, one hand on his shoulder. The man smiled when he saw Martin looking, then leaned over and whispered something in Andrew’s ear.

  Andrew smiled broadly, and they both waved to Martin.

  Martin glanced away, his attention drawn instinctively back to the plate, where Billy swung big, digging deep for a pitch that sailed past him. Strike one.

  When he looked back, the man—Jack—had straightened back up. Andrew waved again, but it wasn’t an acknowledgement, or a greeting. He was waving goodbye, smiling. The man held up three fingers, meeting Martin’s eye, made sure he saw. Three fingers.

  They both turned and started to walk away, the man’s hand back on Andrew’s shoulder.

  Andrew’s name pushed its way up Martin’s throat, but he held it back. He glanced around the field at the players from the other team. Took a step off the base, then back on. What could he do? He couldn’t just leave. He couldn’t yell: everyone would look at him. He couldn’t—

  Andrew and the man stopped, turned, and waved again at Martin.

  The man raised his other hand, gesturing broadly at the air in front of him in a way that made Martin think of painting.

  The slap of the ball into the catcher’s mitt made Martin glance away. When he looked back, he watched as the man seemed to pull away a section of the world, a rectangular piece of the air falling away.

  It looked like a doorway, hanging in nothing.

  And from it spilled a light like Martin had never seen, a rich, golden glow that seemed more pure than sunset, but touched with green and blue, a warm bright that seemed to thrum in the air, to pull at him, drawing him toward it.

  Martin felt suddenly like he was in a dark cave, had always been there, and now, nearing the surface, he was afforded a glimpse out at the world beyond, a world of light and warmth, a glimpse that made him realize how cold, how dark, the world around him really was.

  Andrew and the man stepped into the doorway.

  There was a crack of a bat against a ball and the crowd roared like a single voice, and when Martin looked back, his brother was gone. The man in the leather jacket was gone. The doorway was gone.

  The light was gone.

  He got himself a cup of coffee at the Starbucks at the corner of Government and Yates and sat at an outside table, smoking cigarettes and butting them out in the plastic lid from the coffee-cup.

  Tommy had told him to meet him here, had told him to wait. When he had asked how long, Tommy had just said, “Shouldn’t be too long.”

  Martin hoped not. He glanced at his watch: it was getting late. Midnight coming on fast, and he wanted to be there ahead of time, waiting.

  So much goddamned waiting.

  Oh well. It probably wouldn’t take Tommy too long. It never did in the old days.

  The old days . . .

  Martin marvelled at how much had changed in what felt like such a short time. The years he’d spent in prison had felt like a suspension of time—it surprised him to find that things had moved on, that everything had changed when he wasn’t looking.

  Like this coffee-shop. He remembered when it was a bookstore, remembered spending hours sitting on the floor with Tommy, both of them baked out of their minds, laughing their asses off to Far Side books and Calvin & Hobbes.

  That was after they stopped playing baseball, after Andrew had disappeared, but back when it was still just the two of them. Back before things had started to go wrong.

  At first, Martin wasn’t worried when Andrew disappeared. For some reason, he felt like he could take Jack at his word. The man in the leather jacket had said three days when they had talked in the park. He had held up three fingers as he was leaving with Andrew. And something about that light, spilling in from the doorway he had drawn in the air, so warm. . . .

  Martin trusted him.

  And that feeling held out for three days. He waited, close by the door, the whole of that third day. Every time a policeman knocked, every time the phone rang, he knew, he just knew, that it was someone telling them that Andrew had been found.

  But he wasn’t. And lying in bed, watching midnight coming on, Martin knew, with a cold, sudden certainty, that he wouldn’t be. His brother was gone.

  Of course he couldn’t say anything. He’d spent three days lying—to his mother, to the police, to the people from the TV and the newspaper—he couldn’t come back now and tell them what he’d really seen, what he really knew. It’s not like they would believe him.

  He couldn’t say anything. Hadn’t he wanted Andrew to be gone? Wasn’t that what he told Jack that first night in the park? It was all his fault, wasn’t it?

  He kept his silence while the search continued, through the days after the disappearance when it was like everyone in Victoria passed through their apartment, asking to help; through the days it seemed every telephone pole, every tree, every wall in the city had his brother’s picture under the words “Have You Seen Andrew?” And then later, when the people stopped coming. When the newspaper stopped running stories. When the newscasters would end their short updates with sad shakes of their heads and weighty silences. When the posters yellowed and puckered in the damp, faded and, eventually, disappeared.

  Martin kept his silence.

  It wasn’t hard. There was no one to talk to at home. His mother had come out of her darkness with Andrew’s disappearance, but as time passed she disappeared again into her new role as professional mother, denier of the possibility that Andrew was truly gone. She took to wearing t-shirts printed with the same image from the posters, carrying the question “Have you seen Andrew?” everywhere she went. She kept Andrew’s room exactly the way it had been the morning that he disappeared, and whenever she was interviewed, she insisted that it happen in his room. “We’re keeping it just like this until he comes home,” she would say. She carried Tessa with her everywhere, but she would barely meet Martin’s eye when they passed in the apartment.

  He didn’t tell her that he had quit playing baseball; he never went back after Andrew left. His coach tried calling a few times, but Martin had hung up on him gently, and after a while he stopped trying. His mother never even noticed.

  She didn’t notice when he and Tommy started hanging out together, spending long afternoons in his room with the door closed. She didn’t notice the towels wedged into the seam under the door, and if she noticed the smell of smoke on his clothes, she didn’t say anything.

  The first time he smoked pot it was with Tommy. They were in his room, listening to a Mötley Crüe tape and pretending to do homework when Tommy pulled a baggie out of his knapsack pocket.

  “You wanna?”

  “Sure.” He didn’t hesitate.

  “So where’d you get it?” he asked as Tommy started to roll on the front cover of his science textbook. He already knew the answer.

  “My brother,” Tommy said, simply. There was no need for further explanation: Jimmy Connelly was infamous in the neighbourhood as a drug dealer, the sort of kid that parents warned their children to stay away from.

  Most parents. Martin’s mother hadn’t said anything: she probably di
dn’t even know who Jimmy Connelly was. And if she did, she clearly hadn’t made the connection to Tommy.

  “He says it’s good stuff.”

  “Yeah?”

  He fumbled with the paper. “That’s what he says.”

  Martin watched him in silence. “Have you ever . . .” He cocked his head toward the small pile of weed.

  Tommy puffed himself up like it was the most ridiculous question. “Oh yeah,” he said, his voice louder than it needed to be. Then, as if remembering himself and who he was talking to, he seemed to deflate, and his voice lowered. “A couple of times. With my brother. He let me try it when he was hanging out with his friends. They thought it was pretty funny.”

  Martin waited, then prompted. “And?”

  “And what?”

  “What’s it like?”

  Tommy extended the finished joint toward him. “See for yourself.”

  At first, Martin didn’t notice anything, too focussed on the burning of the smoke in his throat and struggling to suppress a coughing fit as he held the smoke inside him.

  “What do you think?” Tommy asked, after they had passed the joint back and forth a couple of times.

  Martin shook his head, not sure how to tell Tommy that he wasn’t feeling anything.

  “Nothing, eh?”

  Martin smiled half-heartedly.

  “You have to let yourself feel it,” Tommy explained. “Here, lean back.” Martin fell back against the pillow. “Try it again. This time, just let yourself feel it. Close your eyes and really feel it.”

  Martin took another toke and, passing the joint back to Tommy, let his eyelids droop shut. He could hear his pulse in his ears, feel the burning of the smoke in his lungs. And then he thought—no, he could—he could feel the blood in all of his arteries and veins, feel the heat and the motion of it in his chest, the prickly tingling of it in his fingertips. He could feel a rush pushing through him, a surge of warmth and ease, and something else. Potential. For a moment, he felt limitless, and when he breathed out the smoke, he could feel himself connecting to everything in the room, in the universe, a surging openness as if he were cracking slowly open, the light within him spilling out.

  The light . . .

  That was it. What he was feeling was like what he had felt at the ball diamond that day, that feeling of limitlessness, of comfort and ease and connectedness that he had felt when he saw the light from the open doorway. That’s what this was like.

  When he opened his eyes, he thought he saw it, just for a moment: a rich golden light that seemed alive, full of voices, of song, a light he could feel as much as see.

  But then he blinked and it was just his room, with Tommy looking down at him, smiling and nodding. “I told you it was wicked.”

  Martin managed to smile, to conceal his disappointment at the loss of the light. Again.

  He held out his hand for the joint.

  Martin checked his watch—8:15. He sighed, leaned back in his chair. His coffee cup was empty, but he lit another cigarette. They’d be chasing him off this table pretty soon.

  Where the hell was Tommy?

  Every person passing made him look up. Every sound of footsteps, every car idling at the light, caught his attention. He took a deep drag, trying to calm his nerves. Jagged. And the coffee wasn’t helping.

  Where the hell was he?

  Tommy had always been there for him. And he had always been there for Tommy—it went both ways. After a while it was like they were brothers, inseparable. They stayed over at each other’s houses most nights, hung out at school together, cut classes together. When it was the two of them, nothing could stop them.

  It was only when Martin was alone that things seemed to go wrong.

  He was alone the night of the first anniversary of Andrew’s disappearance. He had come home, still half-cut, to get a few hours’ sleep, maybe a shower and a change of clothes.

  His mother was waiting for him. She didn’t even let him get into the apartment before she started in.

  “Where have you been?” she screamed.

  It was all too familiar. Martin glanced around the apartment as she stepping toward him, not catching his breath until he saw Tessa sitting on the living room floor, playing with the wooden blocks that used to be Andrew’s.

  “I was at Tommy’s.”

  “Don’t you lie to me,” she snapped. “Sue just called here to see if there was anything we needed today.” She emphasized the word, as if he might have overlooked its importance. “And to make sure that Tommy wasn’t being a nuisance.”

  Martin shook his head, marvelling at how easily stories could fall apart.

  “She was surprised when I said I thought both of you were over at her house.”

  “Huh.” The sharp chuckle escaped from him before he could stop it.

  She stepped forward, and he watched her hands, steeling himself, while she studied as his face.

  “Are you high?” she asked in a voice not much more than a whisper. This close he could smell the fumes coming off her. Gin this time, it smelled like.

  When he didn’t answer, she repeated the question, more loudly. “Are you high right now?”

  “I guess I come by it naturally,” he said slowly, deliberately.

  This time, the slap didn’t surprise him, and he didn’t wait around for her to be finished yelling at him.

  He pushed past her, and as she was screaming about how he was grounded, how he wasn’t allowed to see Tommy Connelly ever again, he stepped into his room and closed the door.

  He sat at the edge of his bed, listening to her through the door, waiting for his heartbeat to slow down. He’d sleep for a while, he decided. And when he woke up, when he was ready to go out, she’d be out herself, collapsed at the table with her bottle of gin, Tessa put to bed before she let it get too far.

  Until then . . .

  He kicked off his shoes and laid down on the bed. From inside his cigarette pack he took out a flat plastic bag, slid a tab of acid under his tongue and closed his eyes, waiting for the light.

  Tommy slid into the chair across from him without Martin ever hearing him coming. He smiled at his oldest friend, comforted by his mere presence, able to put the reason for their meeting out of his mind for the moment.

  “I was starting to worry that you weren’t going to show up,” Martin said.

  “I’ve never been hung up on punctuality or schedules,” Tommy said. “Do you want a coffee?”

  Martin looked to his empty cup and thought about declining, but he nodded. A little more caffeine might actually help later on.

  Tommy tapped on the window and the kid in line—the kid with the scar, the one who couldn’t stop staring at Martin—turned. Tommy raised two fingers and the kid nodded.

  “You’ve got a butler now?”

  Tommy laughed. “Just another kid from the neighbourhood. Probably thinks he’ll get a handle on the business, steal some trade secrets from me then set himself up.” He shook his head. “Marco. Marco Cezzoni.”

  Tommy reached into his pocket, pulled out his cigarettes and a lighter, and lit up without his eyes leaving Martin’s face. Watching him. Waiting for his reaction. “I think you knew his brother.”

  Martin leaned forward, craning his neck to keep his eye on the kid through the window. That was why he had looked so familiar. Cezzoni. Fucking Rudy Cezzoni.

  Tommy was still watching him intently. “I heard you messed him up pretty good.”

  Martin was sure that he was imagining the sudden burning and itching of the scar on his back. “He got me pretty good.”

  “I heard that, too.”

  The kid was paying for the coffees, then he disappeared around the corner, out of sight, toward the cream and sugar.

  “But you got your own back, right? And then some. Word is it was you that killed him.
Beat him so bad they weren’t even sure whose body they had found. But they couldn’t pin it on you.”

  Martin didn’t say anything to disabuse him of the notion. He was enjoying the smile on Tommy’s face, the quiet admiration in his friend’s eyes. “That was another time. Another place.”

  “You never did take any shit from anybody.”

  “That’ll be on my tombstone,” he said, trying to sound dramatic. “Might also explain why I’ve spent so much time inside, too.”

  They both laughed, stopping only when the kid arrived with their coffees. He served Tommy first, setting the cup carefully in front of him, then repeated the process for Martin. Martin watched: the kid never looked at him, never let on that there was anything between them. Completely calm, completely cool.

  Too calm. Too cool.

  No way was he drinking that coffee.

  The kid walked to the corner of the building, leaned near the door, and lit a cigarette.

  “Is this,” Martin gestured toward Marco, “going to be a problem?”

  Tommy looked down the wall at him. “Marco? Nah. He knows that you and me go back, that there’s history there. He knows better than to fuck with that.” He peeled the plastic cover off his cup and took a drink.

  “Blood runs pretty deep.”

  “He knows better.” Tommy’s tone was flat, certain, allowing for no further discussion.

  “So why do you need a gun?” he asked without warning, the abrupt change of topic taking Martin by surprise.

  “I told you. There’s someone I’ve got to meet.”

  “And you need the gun for protection?” He left the question open.

  Martin didn’t answer.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “I can get you some money in the next couple of . . .”

  Tommy held up a hand. “Don’t.”

  Martin nodded. “All right. Thanks.”

  Tommy shrugged. “I got as clean as I could get on short notice. No history, near as I can tell. The serial is filed off, but. . . .”

  Martin felt a strange relief come over him. He hadn’t even known that he’d been worrying. “Thanks. I appreciate that.”