The Outlaws of Sherwood Street: Giving to the Poor (10 page)

“Where's the spring now?” Ashanti said.

“Gone,” said Mr. Wilders.

“How can a spring be gone?” I said.

“A mere spring?” said Mr. Wilders. “That's easy. The whole Colorado River's practically gone. From what I've been able to discover, this particular Canarsee spring disappeared over two hundred and fifty years ago.”

“Disappeared where?” Ashanti said.

Mr. Wilders shrugged. “Dammed-up, filled in, diverted—who knows? Lost and gone, one of those losses you can't put a dollar value on, no matter how many casinos get built on native land.”

I didn't quite follow the casino part, but the mention of dollars reminded me of something. “Is it true the Indians sold Manhattan for twenty-four dollars?”

“Sixty guilders in trade goods,” said Mr. Wilders. “Which works out to about twenty-four dollars at the time. But the point is—what did the Indians think they were trading? Certainly not exclusive rights to the land, because they didn't think of land that way, as something to be owned.”

“What kind of trade goods?” Ashanti said.

“Probably some useful things—iron tools and textiles. Plus some decorative objects that you call trinkets if you're trying to make the natives seem like suckers, but that I prefer to call jewelry.”

“Jewelry?” I said.

“No gold or diamonds, but nice things, just the same—Italian glass beads, the odd silver charm or two.”

“Silver charm?” Ashanti and I both said at once.

He shrugged. “Small. Nothing fancy. Not unlike Robbie's charm—the one you two seemed to be admiring when I came out.”

My heart did a little stutter step.

“In fact,” Mr. Wilders went on, “I wouldn't mind taking a quick picture of it.”

“You—you want to take a picture of . . .”

“If you don't mind,” Mr. Wilders said. “I'm getting some visuals together on old trading goods.”

“Robbie's charm isn't old,” Ashanti said.

“Granted, but it has the look I'm after.”

Pause. A pause that got longer. What was there to do but hand it over? I handed it over.

Wilders hefted the charm on his palm, gazed at it with interest, and then with a lot more interest. “Where did you get this?”

“Um,” I said.

“Wasn't it a gift?” said Ashanti.

“Yeah. A gift.”

Mr. Wilders gave us a look. “And a very nice one. I suspect it is old, after all. Seventeenth or even sixteenth century, and also European, quite possibly Dutch.” He opened a desk drawer, took out a camera, snapped some pictures of the charm. “Who gave it to you?”

“A friend,” I said, ready for once with the right kind of answer.

“A very good friend,” Mr. Wilders said, giving it back. “Thanks for showing it to me.”

“Sure,” I said.

“But it's not really why we came to see you,” Ashanti said.

“I didn't think so,” said Mr. Wilders. “It's about Silas, right?”

“Not really,” I said.

“Indirectly,” Ashanti added.

“Is he in trouble?”

“No,” I said.

Ashanti chipped in again. “Not him.”

“I don't understand.”

We told him all about Tut-Tut. Not all, exactly, but pretty close, except for the magic.

He listened without a word, his only reaction being a vein that throbbed in his forehead. I realized my mom would have asked a million tough questions; this was better. “I'll see what I can do,” Mr. Wilders said when we came to the end. “And, uh, I hope you pass this on to Silas.”

“Pass what on?” I said.

“That he's helping,” said Ashanti.

Mr. Wilders closed his eyes in an embarrassed sort of way and nodded. Then came a knock on the door. “Jim?” a woman called. “That reporter's here.”

“Be right down.”

14

W
e met Silas at HQ. It was cold but not cold enough to see your breath: the space heater, pulled up close to Silas's feet, glowed red.

“Muffins,” I said, putting a bag of them on the desk.

Silas opened the bag, poked through. “No icing? I like icing.”

“These are healthy,” I said. “Blueberry, cranberry, orange, and carrot.”

“Carrot cake?” Silas said.

“Maybe.”

He took the carrot muffin. “Tut-Tut loves blueberries,” he said, taking a big bite. “They don't have them in Haiti,” he added—or something like that, hard to tell with his mouth so full.

“Speaking of Tut-Tut,” I said, and started in on a description of our visit to the museum.

“Huh?” Silas said, interrupting before I'd barely gotten out of the blocks. “You saw my stupid father?”

“Yeah,” I said. “See, we got the idea that—”

“Without even telling me first?”

There was a silence. No comeback occurred to me. I turned to Ashanti. She looked Silas in the eye and said, “You're one hundred percent right.”

Silas gazed at her. Seeing her in a totally new way? I was considering that when he shook his head and said, “Can't go that far. One hundred percent represents a degree of certainty you'd never find in situations like this. Call it about ninety-eight percent.”

Another silence. And then Ashanti and I were laughing our heads off.

“What?” said Silas. “What's funny?”

We couldn't put it into words, didn't even try. “The point is,” I said, “we've got to do something about Tut-Tut, and we thought your father was the type who might help out.”

“Because he gets involved with every cause that comes along, even at the cost of neglecting his own family?” Silas said.

“Yeah,” said Ashanti, “if you want to put it that way.”

Silas nodded. “Makes sense. Did he go for it?”

“He did,” I said.

“You left out the charm, of course.”

“Not exactly,” I said. And we told him about Dutch silver and his father's research into trading beads.

“What does it mean?” Silas said. “Was the charm part of the twenty-four-dollar deal? Selling Manhattan, all that?”

I took off the charm, laid it on the desk. Did it look centuries old? Not that I could see. Nor did it look brand-new. Or in any way magical. But if Wilders was right, the homeless woman who had dropped it had been sitting in front of a once-sacred place.

“Suppose,” Ashanti said, “it was part of the deal. Did it have magic properties then, or did it get them as a result?”

“Huh?” said Silas.

“What didn't you understand?” Ashanti said.

“Any of it. I didn't get any of it. Zip, zilch, nada.”

“How can anyone be so smart and so dumb at the same time?” Ashanti said.

“The dumb part of me can't tell you,” said Silas.

Ashanti blinked a long slow blink, a danger sign. She turned to me. “Do you see what I'm talking about?”

“Uh,” I said, “some kind of balancing thing? Making the trade for Manhattan actually more even?”

“Kind of,” Ashanti said. “After the fact. More even. More just.”

I kind of hoped that the charm might—not hear us, of course, but in some way react, show a little solidarity. But the charm simply lay there, looking like nothing much. Suddenly it hit me that the wrong person was wearing it. The right person was an orphan, an escaped prisoner, a survivor of a horrible disaster at sea, not someone like me. I'd had a cushy life so far, although when you went to school with kids like Signe Stone, Flagler on her mother's side—cushiest of the cushy—it could slip your mind that you were pretty lucky too.

“Tut-Tut should be the one who wears the charm,” I said.

“Nope,” they both said at once.

“It chose you,” Ashanti said.

“Twice,” Silas added. “Homeless woman first and oyster second. And anyway, Tut-Tut's a guy. Guys don't wear jewelry.”

“Guys wear jewelry all the time,” I said.

“Not guys like me and Tut-Tut,” Silas said. “Guys who do guy things.”

“Such as?” Ashanti said.

Silas dug through a bunch of inner pockets in his Michelin-Man jacket, dumped stuff on the desk: coils of wire, batteries, electronic components I didn't know the names for, balled-up gum wrappers, a small flashlight, cigarette filter tips.

“Whoa,” I said. “You're smoking?”

“Of course not,” said Silas. “Checked the stats? These are for an experiment.”

“What experiment?” Ashanti said.

“Never mind. It didn't work out.” He did some more rummaging. “Here we go.” He laid a sort of card on the desk, a small complicated-looking card with blues and greens merging into each other, lots of different-sized writing; and Tut-Tut's picture. “Ta-da,” Silas said. “Guy thing extraordinaire.”

“What's this?” said Ashanti.

But I knew: Uncle Jean-Claude had one just like it. “A green card,” I said.

“Meaning Tut-Tut's legal?” Ashanti said.

“We just have to put this in his hands,” said Silas.

“Where did you get it?” I said.

“Get it?” said Silas. “I made it, of course, and it wasn't easy. You're looking at state-of-the-art personal identification, brothers and sisters.”

“You made it?” I said. “How?”

“I could explain, but you wouldn't understand.”

“But it's not real,” Ashanti said.

“Depends on your definition,” Silas told her.

“And even if we get it to him, what then?” she went on.

“I can't do all the thinking,” Silas said.

We ate muffins. I hung the charm back around my neck. It felt heavy, like it was dragging me down.

“Ahm indereted in dis bring,” Silas said.

“No one ever told you not to talk with your mouth full?” Ashanti said.

Silas finished chewing. “I'm interested in this spring.”

• • •

We hung out across the street from the Gunn Tower construction site. There were no demonstrators around, just normal traffic and some pedestrians, all of them walking quickly, their clothes flapping in the cold wind and everybody looking miserable, like a raggedy army coming and going. The scaffolding in front of the construction site seemed higher than before, and a huge yellow crane now rose over the plywood walls.

“Crane's not moving,” Silas said. “Ergo—”

“We told you,” Ashanti said. “No more ergos.”

“They're not working today.”

“Good,” I said. “Perfect time to scope things out.” Then, like a well-trained, careful kid, I looked both ways before stepping off the curb, and as I did, caught sight of something in a store window that stopped me right there.

It was one of those electronics stores where everything's always loud and aggressive inside. In the window hung a big TV monitor, and on the screen, with the museum as a backdrop, Dina DeNunzio was interviewing Jim Wilders.
Jim? That reporter's here.
Was there a law that I had to be so slow on the uptake?

“Hey!” I said. Everyone looked. We moved almost like one person toward the window. Sound came faintly through the glass.

“But,” Dina was saying, “a three-judge panel has ruled that you failed to present convincing evidence of Native American occupation on the site.”

“That's their problem,” Wilders said.

“Care to explain what you mean by that?” Dina asked.

“Their minds were made up from the get-go.”

“Are you questioning the integrity of the judges?”

Wilders looked at Dina with irritation. Then he put his hand on the microphone grip, pulled it closer to him. Dina tried to pull it back. Mr. Wilders stared right into the camera, glared at the whole world. “This is only the beginning of a long, long fight. This city, this country, this planet—they have value far beyond the dollars and cents so beloved by Sheldon Gunn, the mayor, and all their kind.” He raised a fist. “Justice!”

Dina, now pretty irritated herself, took back the microphone with a jerk. “Live from Brooklyn, Dina DeNunzio. Back to you, Clint.”

A blow-dried silvery-haired guy appeared on the screen, looked like he was searching for something funny to say.

“Is he a bit crazy?” Ashanti said.

“The studio dude?” said Silas. “They're all like that.”

“I'm talking about your father,” said Ashanti. Her eyes narrowed. “And I thought you didn't even have a TV.”

“You've caught me in a seeming inaccuracy,” Silas said.

They bickered some more, like one of those old married sitcom couples. I wasn't really paying attention. Instead I was trying to imagine what this part of Brooklyn looked like back in the times Wilders was studying. Now it was big city to the max, with hardly a tree in sight and no grass whatsoever. A stream had come bubbling out of the ground right across the street from us? It was hard to picture.

The light turned green. “Let's go,” I said. We crossed the street, cut through a bunch of pedestrians, all of them on phones, talking and texting and not even seeing us, and followed the plywood scaffolding wall on the other side until we came to some holes cut in it for people to see. I stood on my tiptoes and peered through one, seeing a huge pit, much wider than I'd expected, roughly the size and shape of a football field, maybe bigger, and also much deeper. The base of the crane was way, way down there, set deep in the mud. At first nothing moved at all. Then, from out of the sky, a seagull, pure white and very big, came circling down. It swept low over the mud, snatched up a scrap of paper, maybe a fast food wrapper, flapped its wings, and flew away. I remembered seagulls—including a real big one like this—on our wild night at sea, the night I'd lost the charm, and wouldn't have been surprised if the charm had now started heating up or given some other signal. No signal came. Despite that, I made a sort of mental leap on my own. “Suppose we go down there,” I said.

“What for?” Silas said. “There's no sign of a spring—I've seen enough.”

“I haven't,” said Ashanti.

“Two to one,” I said.

“So what?” said Silas. “Everybody thought the charge of the light brigade was a good idea, too—until it happened.”

I wasn't sure what the charge of the light brigade was, didn't want to get into it. No need to. Ashanti had already moved off, was following the plywood wall. We followed her—Silas in the rear, humming some sort of tune, possibly the kind played for cavalry charges. We came to the next block, turned the corner. This street wasn't as busy. Up ahead, Ashanti had stopped and was bent down, examining where the scaffolding wall met the sidewalk pavement. Was the plywood a little cracked, like maybe something had banged into it? She glanced around. No one to see but us outlaws. She gave the base of the wall a quick, hard kick, knocking out a piece of plywood in one try.

Silas and I approached the opening. Not a big opening, but just enough room for three kids to squeeze through one at a time.

“No way,” Silas said. “I'll never fit.”

“You'll have to take off that stupid jacket,” Ashanti said.

“I'll freeze to death.”

“We'll pass it through, for God's sake!” Ashanti said. “You can put it on when we're inside!”

“Sounds iffy,” Silas said.