Robbie Forester and the Outlaws of Sherwood Street (9 page)

“No way,” Ashanti said.

“You said you had an idea.”

“More like an urge,” Ashanti said. “I just had to. There was this pressure building in my head, building and building, and I thought the red-gold beam would happen, but it didn’t.”

“So you believed me about that? The beam and all?”

“Yeah.”

“No doubts?”

“Nope.”

“But why?” I said. “It’s actually not so easy to believe. I’m still having trouble myself.”

Ashanti flicked my shoulder with the back of her hand. “Hey! What’s wrong with you? Trying to get me to doubt you? A little too late, don’t you think, now that I’ve got this hovercraft thing going?”

I laughed. So did Ashanti. She gave my shoulder another one of those backhand flicks.

“Any pressure now?” I asked. “Inside your head, I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” Ashanti said. “And the answer’s no. The moment I rose up it was all gone,
pffft,
just like that.”

“Do you think you could do it again?”

Ashanti closed her eyes, took a deep breath. A moment passed. “No,” she said. Her eyes opened. They turned yellow in the headlights of a taxi passing by, then went back to normal, an effect I’d probably seen many times at night, but now inspired a new thought, probably crazy:
there’s magic in the world.
“What about you?” Ashanti said. “Can you make the beam happen?”

“No.”

“Try.”

I tried my best, if trying my best meant squeezing my eyes shut, scrunching up my face, and praying for a headache. No electric ball, no currents, no beam, no change of any kind. I shook my head.

“What if we both touch the heart?” Ashanti said.

“We’ll get a shock.”

“So what?”

We both touched the heart. Surprise: no shock. Also no beam, no levitation.

“Something extra has to be in the mix,” Ashanti said. “Some outside thing makes it happen.”

“The New Brooklyn Redevelopment Project?” I said. But that couldn’t be right: the New Brooklyn Redevelopment Project had nothing to do with the foul on the basketball court. And what about Tut-Tut? How could there be any connection between those skateboarders and Sheldon Gunn? What did all those events or situations or whatever they were have in common? I didn’t know.

“Poor Mr. Nok,” Ashanti said. “Comes all this way for his dream, cooks the greatest food in town, and then gets kicked onto the street. There’s no justice.”

“Whoa! Say that again.”

“About Mr. Nok and the American dream and—”

“No. The last part.”

“There’s no justice?”

“Exactly.” I was getting excited. “That’s the outside thing, what makes the magic happen!”

“Magic?”

“Or whatever this is. Maybe not magic, but something special.” And didn’t it have to be special, because of all the injustice around? I suddenly felt the weight of the injustice, as if the whole huge city and all its buildings were pressing down.

“Injustice is the outside thing?” Ashanti said.

“Any other explanation?” I said.

“Sure,” said Ashanti. “We’re both out of our minds.”

A
shanti lived across the street from me and three or four stoops down. Her apartment was on the ground floor, but it looked a lot like ours: we even had the same kind of fridge. One big difference was all these professional-type photos on the living-room walls, the same beautiful young woman in each of them. Ashanti noticed me staring at them and said, “My mom—back in her modeling days.”

“Wow,” I said. “She was a professional model?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Hey! This one’s a
Vogue
cover.”

“Yeah.”

“Wow,” I said again. I’d never seen anyone so beautiful. Ashanti—lighter-skinned than her mother—was beautiful, too, but not like this, so perfect, so dramatic. “She’s not a model anymore?”

Ashanti shook her head. “They’re like athletes,” she said. “All washed-up at thirty-five, sooner in her case.”

“What does she do now?” I said.

Ashanti glanced down the hall. “At this very moment?” she said. “Probably resting.”

“Oh,” I said. I got the impression—maybe later than most people would—that Ashanti didn’t feel like discussing her mother. Then—maybe sooner than most people—I found myself asking about her father. “What does your dad do?”

Ashanti’s eyes narrowed. “Are you always this nosy?”

“Sorry.”

“He’s a film editor.”

“Yeah? Cool.”

“It’s not. Mostly he does car commercials.” She sat on the couch, flipped open a laptop.

“What cars?” I said.

Ashanti glared at me. “Look. Are you in on this or not?”

“In on what?”

“Helping Mr. Nok.”

“How are we going to do that?”

“How? Like you helped that soup kitchen place, that’s how.”

“But that just happened,” I said. “I can’t make it happen—didn’t we just go through all this?”

“So we give up?” Ashanti said. “Just roll over without a fight?”

“No,” I said. Rolling over without a fight sounded bad. “But what are we going to do?”

“That’s what we’ve got to figure out, right?” Ashanti said. She patted the cushion beside her. I sat down. “What’s the guy’s name, again?” she said.

“Sheldon Gunn.”

We looked up Sheldon Gunn. He turned out to be a billionaire, and not just a billionaire but the third richest billionaire in the whole world.

“A billion is what, exactly?” I said.

“A thousand million,” Ashanti said. “A one and nine zeroes.” She glanced at me. “Hard to get your head around a number like that, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Suppose,” she said, tapping at the keyboard, “you took that billion dollars and invested it for a measly three percent return, like in the bank.” More tapping. “You’d get thirty million dollars per year. About eighty-two thousand a day. That’s if you have one billion. Sheldon Gunn has forty-three, so you’d have to multiply that by eighty-two thousand to find out what he’d be making a day.” Tap-tap. “Three million five hundred twenty-six thousand.”

“A day?”

“Yeah,” said Ashanti. “But that’s not good enough for Sheldon Gunn.”

“What do you mean?”

“If he was just letting his money pile up in the bank, then he wouldn’t be doing what he’s doing.”

“The Brooklyn redevelopment thing?”

“And God knows what else. That’s why we have to do some research. But here’s our one hard fact—three million five hundred twenty-six thousand a day’s not getting it done for him.”

We researched Sheldon Gunn. He owned things, lots and lots, including
Boffo
, the second biggest yacht in the world; all kinds of art; many houses, including castles in Ireland and France; the biggest ranch in Wyoming, and another even bigger one in Argentina. But the center of it all seemed to be the Sheldon Gunn Organization, which was about real estate holdings—tower after tower in New York, Chicago, London, Dubai, and other cities. The New Brooklyn Redevelopment Project was one little arm of the Sheldon Gunn Organization, hardly mentioned at all, except by residents who’d pretty much given up on trying to stop it. Sheldon Gunn also had a wife—his fourth, way younger than him—named Genevieve. There were lots of pictures of Genevieve online, making it easy, as Ashanti said, to trace the course of her plastic surgeries. Maybe it was a bit cruel of us—after all, we didn’t know the woman, although she was quoted as saying some funny things, like “Shelley’s biggest problem is he never thinks about himself” and “We’d be just as
happy in a tiny cottage”—but soon Ashanti and I were laughing and laughing, tears rolling down our faces.

“What’s so funny?”

We turned, and there was Ashanti’s mother at the opening to the dark hallway, dressed in a white nightgown, buttoned to the top. She looked so different from in the photos. It wasn’t that she’d put on weight, which was what you might expect for an ex-model; in fact, she maybe had lost some, even though she’d been skinny to begin with. But the dramatic part had grown much, much stronger, so strong that the beauty part had gotten overwhelmed. Her hair was wild; her cheekbones cast shadows; her eyes were blurry.

“Sorry if we woke you,” Ashanti said, her voice flat in a way I hadn’t heard from her before. “This is Robbie.”

“I wasn’t sleeping,” said Ashanti’s mom. “I was only resting.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said.

Ashanti’s mom seemed to focus on me for the first time. “You’re the one who’s moving to Paris?”

“No,” I said. “Not me.”

She nodded. “You wouldn’t have liked it anyway—it’s changed so much,” she said. “Is anyone going to tell me what the joke is?”

“There’s really no joke, Mom,” Ashanti said. “Just stuff on the net.”

“Such as,
par example
?” said Ashanti’s mom.

“Things this woman said,” Ashanti replied.

“What woman?”

“Genevieve Gunn.”

“Née Skallinsky?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“She never made me laugh,” Ashanti’s mom said. “But I haven’t seen her in years.”

“You know her?” Ashanti said.

“I knew her,” said Ashanti’s mom. “Back when dinosaurs roamed Seventh Avenue.” She looked at me. “Nice to meet you, too, Robbie. That’s a nice name.”

“Thanks,” I said. “And nice to—”

She’d already turned and vanished down the hall.

Ashanti and I looked at each other. Her nostrils were flared; her face wasn’t happy. Maybe her apartment looked a lot like mine, but the air felt different, if that made sense: much heavier.

“Seventh Avenue,” I said. “Is that the Fashion District?”

Her expression changed; anger had a lot more energy in it than sadness. “You never stop, do you?” she said.

“Huh?”

“With your personality.”

“Huh?” I said again. But then this quick turn of events hit me for what it was—I mean, my personality was me—and the next clear thing I knew—this was after
some raised voices on both our parts—I was on the street. My street: home territory, but I felt disoriented anyway and close to tears. I made a conscious effort not to let them flow. I had a pretty good life, with or without friends. Didn’t I? Okay, so maybe a tear or two, but there wasn’t time for any more of that because when I crossed the street and approached my house, Tut-Tut stepped out of the shadows.

“Tut-Tut?” I said.

He wore his hoodie, torn jeans, plus mismatched sneakers, one white, one black, and both too big for him; also his nose was running.

“R-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-,” he said. “R-r-r-r-r…”

“Robbie?” I said, guessing what he was trying to say.

He nodded, a very vigorous up-and-down that made me have an unpleasant thought: it was kind of a silent stuttering, as though Tut-Tut were all about stuttering. I brushed that thought away. I knew very well that Tut-Tut didn’t stutter inside, in fact had a commanding voice that just couldn’t get out.

“I-,” he said. “I-I-I-I…”

“What is it?” I said. “What’s wrong?” Something was wrong—I could see it on his face.

Tut-Tut didn’t even try to answer. He just reached out and grabbed my arm with both of his. What was going on? Tut-Tut was squeezing so hard it hurt, and
I was just about to pull away when I figured it out: he was trying to make the shock happen, trying to get hold of that electric thing that had the power to make him talk.

But there was no shock. No electrical ball, no power. Tut-Tut let go. “N-n-n-n-n-n-n-,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t make it happen.” There had to be injustice in the mix, as Ashanti and I had figured out. But wasn’t Tut-Tut’s stutter an injustice? How could it possibly be just for him to be afflicted like this? So maybe the whole injustice idea was wrong. What was I missing? I stood on the street, the wind picking up, icy rain starting to fall, and tried to think. No thoughts came. Then I noticed that Tut-Tut was shivering.

“Hey,” I said. “Want to come inside?”

“W-w-w-w-,” he said.

“I live here,” I said, gesturing at the building. “Let’s get out of the rain. I can make hot chocolate.”

Tut-Tut didn’t move, just gazed at me from inside his hoodie, the seams all frayed.

“And we could have a snack,” I said, even though I wasn’t the least bit hungry myself. “Some leftovers from Your Thai, maybe.”

Tut-Tut’s look was blank. Was it possible he didn’t know about Thai food? More than possible, I thought a moment or two later, a moment or two too late, as usual.
And was there something a little rude or insensitive in even raising the idea of Thai food with Tut-Tut, as if I’d asked him what country club he belonged to? Not that I belonged to a country club myself, although I’d been to one—my uncle Joe’s, in New Jersey—the day I had my only golfing experience, the only one I’ll ever have, guaranteed.

We stood in the rain, getting wet. It was like I had to find the magic words or something. “Besides,” I said, “I’ve got your flip-flops and spray paint.”

I caught a flicker of interest from inside Tut-Tut’s hoodie. I took out my keys and opened the door. Tut-Tut moved toward the entrance. At that moment, the other door opened and Mitch, the landlord, came out, unfurling an umbrella. He had a frown on his face and his forehead was knitted, as though he was working on some tough problem—his usual look. Mitch glanced at me.