He laughs. “Anything you agree to is allowed.”
Before I can ask what that means, he stands and snags his keys. We slide into the El Camino, and a charged silence fills the car. The night is dark and oppressive, with no moon or stars visible behind the dense layer of low hanging clouds overhead. It’s only March, but the humidity makes the air heavy and thick, an edge of irritability in the air, like you want to just throw it off already.
“Where’s Maddox?” I ask after a minute.
“Out doing crew shit,” Lennox says. “He’s more into the shooting part than I am.”
The shooting part.
Sometimes I forget they aren’t just two fine guys who live across the hall, ones I can’t have. They’re gangsters. Now that I live with them, I hear a lot about the Murder of Crows. They don’t treat it like a big secret, like something that has to be talked about in whispers or behind closed doors so I don’t hear. It’s such a big part of their life that it’s ordinary to them, and they talk openly about it. I overhear plenty.
Still, it’s hard to swallow the fact that Maddox actually enjoys killing people.
We turn onto the highway a few minutes later and head out of Faulkner, past rice paddies with swampy woods beyond, and toward the exit to Ridgedale. I think about my old friends, fellow nerds who were as sheltered from gangs as I was. At first, we didn’t have a phone in our new place. Once we hooked it up, I called them on occasion, but the calls got fewer and further between as the weeks went by. Now, I can’t remember the last time we spoke. We all knew that I wasn’t coming back, and they moved on with new friends, crushes, boyfriends…
I turn to Lennox. “How’d you get into the Crows, anyway?”
He glances sideways at me and shifts into a higher gear. “We already told you, that’s not for you,” he says. “Those girls… They’re not like you.”
“Because they’re tough?” I press.
“Because they’re desperate,” he says flatly. “They get fucked in by the whole crew. The guys get beaten in.”
“You got beat up by the whole crew to get in?”
“Si,”he says, whipping off the interstate and onto the exit ramp. The speed makes my stomach drop, and a little knot of exhilaration and fear tangles up in my belly as we skid to a stop at the stop sign where the ramp ends.
“But why?” I ask after he’s turned onto the winding two-lane road toward Ridgedale.
“Why can’t you join?” he asks, shifting smoothly and sweeping around a long curve in the road. “Because I’m not going to let anyone touch you, which kind of makes being fuckedorbeaten in out of the question.”
“No, I mean… Why’d you join?”
He shrugs. “Shit went down, and it became necessary.”
I sigh in frustration. “Why won’t you tell me?”
“It’s not my story to tell,” he says, turning onto the dirt road to the rock quarry.
“Whose story is it?”
He hesitates a moment before speaking. “It’s Mom’s.”
“Oh,” I say, nodding. “Maddox said it had to do with your dad leaving.”
Lennox doesn’t answer, just pulls up into empty area beside the quarry. One other vehicle is parked at the end of the space, a truck sitting under the sprawling branches of an old oak.
“Did you both join at once?”
“Si.”
“I would have figured Maddox joined first,” I muse. “And then gave you shit until you joined.”
Lennox’s jaw tenses, and he grips the top of the wheel with one hand, staring straight ahead. “Why? You think I’m a pussy?”
“No,” I protest. “I just… Like you said, he seems more like the type who’d be into shooting people. You’re… Caring. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine you doing that stuff.”
“It was my idea,” he says quietly, still staring out over the abyss of the quarry ahead. “To become affiliated with the Skull and Crossbones. And to form crews by neighborhood, to take care of shit at home.”