The Outlaws of Sherwood Street: Giving to the Poor (2 page)

2

M
y name's Dina DeNunzio,” she said.

“I know,” I told her. “I've seen you on TV.”

“And I just can't shake the feeling I've seen you, too,” Dina said.

“I've never been on TV.”

She laughed. “Doesn't matter,” she said. “The point is, Robbie, that—”

“Hey! How do you know my name?”

“Your Thai is such a small place,” she said. “I couldn't help overhearing your conversation with the owner”—she took out a notebook—“Nopadon Nok. My apologies if I've offended you.” She let go of my arm.

“No, no,” I said, not offended, more like uncomfortable. And also a bit distracted: Mr. Nok's first name was Nopadon? Nopadon Nok, all those
n
's and
o
's. It was like a tiny poem.

“And I couldn't help but also observe the good relationship that the two of you seem to have,” Dina went on. “Which is why I'm hoping you might be able to help me with a story I'm working on.”

“Uh, what story?” I said.

“It's about the New Brooklyn Redevelopment Project,” she said.

“I don't know anything about that.”

Dina smiled, like I'd just cracked a joke. “My mistake—I could have sworn I heard you and Mr. Nok discussing it.”

“Well, I've heard of it,” I said. “I am a citizen of Brooklyn.”

“Nice,” she said. “Can I quote you? I'll need your last name.” She took out a pen, flipped to a new page in her notebook.

“Quote me?” Her pen hovered over the page, like a thin creature about to pounce.

“You'd prefer this to be off the record?”

My true preference was for this to be all over right now. How to put that politely?

“No problem,” Dina said before an idea had come to me.

She closed the notebook and tucked it away in her jacket, a very cool jacket, I noticed: rich red leather with a thick zipper and matte-finish studs. At that moment, for the first time, an answer to that annoying question kids often get—What do you want to be when you grow up?—hit me: a journalist!

“But,” Dina went on, “I'd be interested in what you know about the NBRP.”

I shrugged my shoulders. I was wearing my somewhat puffy winter jacket with the white shoulder patches, a jacket I'd loved until a few seconds ago and was now starting to hate.

“Just that they were raising rents and stuff,” I said.

“What do you know about Sheldon Gunn?”

“Never heard of him.”

“No?” Dina said. “He's quite a prominent figure in New York. Owns
Boffo,
the biggest private yacht in the world. It's often in the news.”

“Yeah?” I said. In fact, as I knew from research Ashanti and I had done,
Boffo
was only the second biggest yacht in the world. I also knew what it was like to sneak onboard in the middle of the night on the open sea and soon be facing a grim and violent death. “Never heard of it, either.”

“What about that notice—the anonymous benefactor shoving cash through the mail slot?”

“Kind of amazing.”

“Are you aware that similar money dumps took place in other parts of Brooklyn that same night?”

I shook my head.

“No idea who the benefactor or benefactors might be?”

“No. This is all news to me.”

Dina gave me one of her narrow-eyed looks, then handed me her card. “In case you do hear anything, please keep me in mind.”

“Sure,” I said. “But why would I be hearing anything?”

“Because you're a kid,” Dina said. “And the rumor going around is that a band of kids is mixed up in all this, kind of modern-day Robin Hoods.”

A jolt went through me, made my knees go weak and stopped my breathing. My world shrank down to that narrow-eyed look outside and the wild panic inside. “Oh?” I said, my voice quite a bit higher than usual, up there in six-year-old range. I forced myself to breathe again, tried to get my voice back under control. “Really?” Really: the puniest response there was.

“That's the rumor.” Did Dina's lips start curving up in that little smile? The nearest streetlight was out, so I couldn't be sure. “But if true, I'd have a sympathetic reaction, if you see what I mean.”

“I don't.”

“My coverage would be positive,” Dina said. “Here's something you might not have realized—shown in the right light, those kids could be stars.”

“Huh?”

“Why not? Wasn't Robin Hood a star?”

“Robin Hood wasn't even a real person for sure,” I said. “And maybe these . . . kids of yours aren't real either.”

Now Dina did smile. “Great answer,” she said. “You'd be a terrific interview.”

I started shaking my head. She held up her hand.

“Someday,” she said. “Maybe. No pressure.”

No pressure: I liked hearing that, began to relax a little, which was just when Dina asked one more question.

“And your last name, again?”

“Forester.” I just blurted it out, taken by surprise, thrown by that sneaky
again,
too dumb to live.

“Robbie Forester,” Dina said. Then came a strange silence, with my name just sort of hanging there between our breath clouds. “What an interesting name.”

• • •

Things had gotten suddenly busy back home, not unusual. Mom was at her desk, paging impatiently through a long document, her ear to the phone: Mom's job had to do with restructuring debt, about which I had no clue. All I knew was that debt could need restructuring at any hour of the day or night. As for my dad, I could hear him upstairs, pacing around. Pacing around meant he was wrestling with a new idea. Those wrestling matches could also happen at any hour of the day or night.

I called out, “I'm back,” then went to the kitchen, got out the chopsticks, opened the Your Thai cartons, and dug in.

Surprise. I turned out not to be hungry. Not hungry even though I hadn't eaten since lunchtime at school and here was fresh and steaming
kaeng phet ped yang
right before my eyes?

But all I could think of was,
What an interesting name.
It closed my stomach up tight.

I went upstairs to my room. From my parents' room down the hall came the sound of my dad, still pacing, plus “but if . . .” and “why couldn't . . .” and “that would mean . . .” and more writer talk like that. I already knew one thing for sure: no way I wanted to be a writer. A reporter, on the other hand? I entered my room, stood in front of the mirror, tried out narrow-eyed looks, some with glasses on and one blurry take with glasses off. Have I mentioned that I wear glasses? And that Dr. Singh, the ophthalmologist, won't even consider contacts until you're thirteen?

I won't bother to describe my room, except to say it's not big. But in the city you're lucky to have a bedroom all to yourself—although the truth is Pendleton is sort of my roommate. For example, at the moment he was lying on the bed, taking up most of the space. Pendleton's a very big, tweedy-looking mix of this and that, and also timid and lazy. His sleepy eyes followed me across the room. He worked up the energy to raise his tail a few inches and let it fall in a soft thump of greeting.

“Move over.”

He didn't budge. I squeezed onto a corner of the bed and gave him a pat. “We've got a problem, Pendleton. Any ideas?”

He licked my hand, one of his two or three go-to ideas. I took out my phone, texted Ashanti, got no response, called, and was sent to voice mail. I called Silas.

“Yo,” he said.

“Silas? Please don't say yo.”

“Why not?”

“It's not you.”

“What's me?”

“I don't know,” I said. “We need to talk.”

“About what's me?”

“Oh, my God. Silas!”

“Yo.”

I took a deep breath. Friendship with Silas—if that was indeed what we had—involved taking a lot of deep breaths. “Do you know who Dina DeNunzio is?”

“Spokesman for the pope.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That's what a nuncio does. I've read all about the popes. For a while, there were two at a time, although you probably knew that.”

I hadn't known that. Silas was a homeschooler, knew things no one else did. “Dina DeNunzio's a TV reporter. She's been sniffing around.”

“Sniffing around what?”

“Think.”

“Can't you just tell me? I'm kind of busy right now.”

I tried and tried not to say “doing what?” and failed.

“Know those automatic flushing toilets?” he said. “I'm building an app that will flush every single one of them within a three-mile radius at my command.”

“Is that a good idea?”

“Can't think of a better one.”

“Let's do this in person,” I said.

“Do what?”

“Our talk. It's a half day for me and Ashanti tomorrow. Can you be at HQ around noon?”

“I was kind of planning to sleep in.”

“Noon, Silas. Be there.”

• • •

Now's the time, no avoiding it, to admit that I go to private school, namely Thatcher Academy. Not my idea. Some kids from my part of Brooklyn got sent to private school right from kindergarten. Others made the switch later. My parents, on account of their beliefs about society, had waited until what all their friends said was the last possible moment—namely seventh grade, if they had any ambition for me at all—and then caved.

Of course, lots of kids stayed in public school, Tut-Tut for example. Which was why, the next morning, I walked to Thatcher instead of taking the train—twenty-five blocks including the detour to stop by my old public school, Joe Louis, where Tut-Tut went. It was the best way to get in touch with Tut-Tut: he didn't have a phone, didn't have much at all.

I came to the chain-link that enclosed the Joe Louis school yard, a small yard with cracked pavement and litter in the corners, and looked through. Three kids were shooting hoops at the single backboard, but everyone else was clustered around the doors, waiting for the bell to ring and free them from the cold. Tut-Tut could usually be found at a spot of smooth pavement behind the backboard, making his little chalk drawings. Tut-Tut was very artistic, made wonderful drawings, usually of things like parrots or flowers from Haiti, which was where he was from.

I didn't see him. Kind of odd, because Tut-Tut didn't like to hang around his apartment, always got to school early and stayed late. Tut-Tut lived in the projects with his uncle; I'd met the uncle, and understood.

The bell rang. I checked down the street in the direction Tut-Tut would be coming from. No Tut-Tut. The basketball players took their last shots and started shuffling reluctantly toward the school building. They were all boys, two of them already sporting fuzzy mustaches. I picked the unmustached one and called through the fence.

“Where's Tut-Tut?” Toussaint was actually Tut-Tut's real name, but no one used it.

“Huh?” said the kid.

“You know,” said one of the others. “That loser.”

And the third one said, “Th-th-th-that l-l-l-l-” That—a lame imitation of Tut-Tut's stutter—broke them all up, like it was the highest form of comedy.

“He's not a loser,” I said. “Where is he?”

They all came to the fence. “Who are you?” said the one with the thickest mustache.

I gave him a closer look. Carlos something or other: he'd been in the class across the hall the year before, my last year at Joe Louis, but six inches shorter then, and baby-faced.

“Robbie,” I said. “I used to be in Ms. Hernandez's class.”

He squinted at me. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Where are you now?”

“That doesn't matter. I'm looking for Tut-Tut.”

“Why?”

“We're friends.”

“Tut-Tut ain't got no friends.”

“You're wrong about that.”

“Yeah? If you're such a good friend, how come you don't know he's gone?”

“Gone? What do you mean—gone?”

“INS got him,” the mustached kid said. “Swept him right up.”

“G-g-g-g-gone,” said the mimicker, getting an even bigger laugh this time.

3

O
ther than Ashanti, I hadn't made many friends at Thatcher. Yet. I had to keep that
yet
in mind. But there were lots of good things about the school, including the beauty of the building itself—a grand nineteenth-century affair on the outside, light and modern on the inside, with all the best of everything. Another good thing, maybe the best, was the fact that there weren't nearly as many actual school days as in public school. Today, for example, and a half day at that, was the end of the semester, and at Joe Louis, they still had almost a week to go.

Half day meant my last class was history with Mr. Stinecki. The male teachers at Thatcher always wore ties. Mr. Stinecki was wearing a tie decorated with martini glasses, one of his favorites. He was in his second year at Thatcher, and the word was it would be his last.

“Here are the robber baron essays,” he said, passing them out. The topic:
Robber Barons or Captains of Industry? Discuss with reference to a least three people from the following list. . . .
And then had come all those names, lots of which you still saw on buildings, even though the men themselves were long dead. Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie, Flagler. Signe Stone, who sat next to me, was a Flagler on her mother's side; at the moment, she had her head down, busy texting someone. I couldn't help but notice her grade: A big red A. I myself got a big red B minus.
You've drawn interesting parallels to contemporary circumstances, Robbie, but that wasn't the topic. Also you referenced only two names from the list. Other than that, nice job.
At Joe Louis I'd never had a grade less than A; at Thatcher I still didn't have even one. Three names from the list! How had I slipped up on that?

“Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Killer Kwanzaa,” Mr. Stinecki said, as we all filed out at the end of class. “Anybody know of a vacant ski house, by the way?”

• • •

The eighth-graders had their lockers outside the music room, which was where I found Ashanti. “Hey,” she said. “Didn't get back to you last night.”

“I noticed.”

She shot me a quick look. “Don't need any attitude right now.”

Ashanti could be very intimidating. She was tall and beautiful, but not at all cute or even pretty. What else? There was how she carried herself, for one thing, head up and confident. Plus her coffee-crème skin, always clear and unblemished, even though the rest of us were living through the age of sneak-attack blemishes that could strike at any time.

“I was just saying I noticed is all,” I said. “What am I supposed to do—not notice things I notice?”

Ashanti glared down at me, like some biting remark was on the way, and then came a big surprise: her eyes misted up and she turned quickly away and started rummaging around inside her locker, rummaging like she was annoyed at the things in there.

“What?” I said. “What's going on?”

“Not now.”

“But we need to talk.”

Now she turned on me, her voice rising. “What the hell about?”

My voice rose, too. “Dina DeNunzio, for one thing,” I said. “She—” At that moment, I grew aware of someone passing behind us in the hall and possibly slowing down. I whipped around and there was Mr. Stinecki. He looked away, not meeting my gaze, and sped up.

“What about her?” Ashanti said, taking a book out of her locker and slamming it shut.

“Shh,” I said, touching her shoulder. We exchanged a look, hard to describe except to say that maybe it was the kind of look that only people who'd been through big danger together could share. We said no more until we were out on the street.

• • •

It was clear and cold outside, the sky an icy blue, the snow on Thatcher's block all removed except for a blackened snowbank or two. We crossed the street, passed an old woman wearing multiple layers with a New York Giants football jersey on top. She paused to fish cans out of a trash barrel. We kept going, and I told Ashanti about Mr. Nok, Dina DeNunzio, Silas, HQ, and—way more important—Tut-Tut.

“Whoa,” Ashanti said. “Just because those jerks told you he got busted doesn't mean it's true. They have to say stuff like that to keep up their jerkdom memberships.”

“You saying we should pay a visit to Tut-Tut's place?”

“I was just about to,” Ashanti said. We hurried to the next subway stop, took the stairs down two at a time, because there was a rush of cold air in our faces,: a train was on its way. We swiped our cards and hopped on just as the doors were closing.

We got off two stops away, ran up to street level. Across the street stood the Quality Coffin Company—“Reliable and Dependable Since 1889.” The delivery door was open, and inside I could see a worker loading a coffin onto the back of a truck. He had no trouble handling the coffin by himself: it was a very small coffin.

“Christ,” Ashanti said, as though our thoughts were running parallel. Then she added, “When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions.”

“What's that?”

“Something we learned in English today. It always happens when you least expect it.”

“Sorrow coming?”

She shook her head no. “Something from school suddenly making sense.”

“I'm still waiting,” I said.

Ashanti laughed.

We went by some auto repair shops, the sidewalks all greasy in front of them. “In that sorrows thing,” I said, “were you including whatever you were going to tell me back at school?”

Ashanti gazed into the distance. “Later,” she said, and a silence fell between us.

On the next block, we came to Tut-Tut's place, if that was how to put it. Tut-Tut lived in the projects—in this case, on the third floor of a dark brick high-rise wedged in between two high-rises just like it. Someone had spilled a plastic garbage bag full of clothes in the treeless, bushless yard out front, clothes that must have been wet and now were frozen in strange positions that no human could adopt.

We walked to the big front door, a glass door smeared with many handprints that glared in the sunshine. It was locked.

“Now what?” said Ashanti, who'd never been here before.

“We just wait,” I told her.

And in a minute or two, a bony-faced woman in a hoodie came hurrying out. I caught the door before it closed. An old man drinking from a paper-bag-wrapped bottle watched us cross the little lobby to the elevator.

“Dream on,” he said.

I pressed the button.

“But it ain't gonna come true,” said the old man. “Crappy thing's out of order.”

“Then there should be a sign,” Ashanti snapped at him.

Ashanti could startle people, even adults sometimes, but not this guy. He laughed, took another swig, and again said, “Dream on.”

We took the stairs. The air turned very warm right away, stiflingly hot, actually, and full of smells, none of them good. On the third floor, we walked down a dim hall, where things cooled down again, all the way to cold. Some of the doors had Christmas decorations on them, but not Tut-Tut's. I knocked.

On the other side of the door, a man yelled, “He's got the drop on you,” and a woman screamed, “Shoot the sucker.” Then came blasts of machine-gun fire,
ACK-ACK-ACK, ACK-ACK-ACK.
I recognized that stupid dialogue from a video game Silas liked to play,
Death Commandos in Hell,
and knocked again, harder. Inside the sound got turned down, footsteps moved across the floor, and a man called, “Who's there?” His English was very good, with just a trace of a Haitian accent, which sounds kind of French. This was Tut-Tut's uncle, Jean-Claude. I smelled booze right through the door.

“Is Tut-Tut here?” I said.

The door opened. Uncle Jean-Claude peered down at us, forty-ouncer in hand. He was tall and thin, and resembled Tut-Tut in some ways—they had the same high cheekbones, for example. But the effect was very different: Tut-Tut's face was sweet, Jean-Claude's mean. Over his shoulder I could see the TV, a futuristic war frozen on the screen.

His bloodshot eyes went to me, then Ashanti, and back. Did he even remember me? He'd been pretty wasted the only time we'd met, a nasty occasion that had ended with Jean-Claude knocking Tut-Tut to the floor with a vicious backhand blow and Tut-Tut and me taking off. Recognition dawned, which I knew from his face getting meaner.

“You,” he said.

No denying that. “Is Tut-Tut here?” I said.

He turned and called over his shoulder in a high voice, maybe mimicking me. “Boy! Are you here?”

Silence.

“Don't look like it,” Jean-Claude said.

“Do you know where he is?” I said. “He wasn't in school today.”

Jean-Claude put his hand over his chest in a dramatic sort of way. “Not in school today? How will he ever get ahead in this earthly life?”

I could feel Ashanti's anger rising. It jumped the space between us, like some kind of instant contagion, and set me off. “What the hell?” I said. “Why are you doing this? Just tell us!”

For a moment, I thought Jean-Claude was about to get angry too. Instead he smiled and said, “Well, well. A hotheaded young chick.” He glanced at Ashanti. “Two hotheaded young chicks.” And now he did start to look angry, or at least annoyed. “How does that little retard get friends like you?”

“He's not a retard,” we said together.

“No?” said Jean-Claude. “Then how come the INS grabbed him?”

“Oh, no!” I said. “Is it true?”

“Couldn't be truer,” said Jean-Claude.

“Why didn't they grab you?” Ashanti said.

“I'm no retard,” Jean-Claude said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a laminated card with his photo on it. “Plus, I have this, and he doesn't.”

“What is it?” I said.

“A green card,” Jean-Claude said. His chin tilted up. “I'm as legal as you.”

I gazed at the green card. It wasn't even green. For some reason, that seemed important to me.

“How did it happen?” Ashanti said.

Jean-Claude shrugged.

“Come on,” she said. “There must be illegal immigrants all over the city.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Why did they pick on Tut-Tut?”

“Don't ask me,” Jean-Claude said, but his eyes shifted, not meeting ours.

“Oh, my God!” I said.

“You dimed him out,” said Ashanti.

Jean-Claude raised the forty-ouncer, practically poured it down his throat, then wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve. “Think what you want,” he said.

What I wanted was to do something real bad to him. All I could think of was grabbing that green card, held loosely in his non-beer hand, so that was what I did.

Jean-Claude called me a name I'm not going to repeat and tried to snatch it back, but he was slow and clumsy, maybe much drunker than I'd thought. I retreated into the hall, Ashanti right beside me. He took a step or two after us, his movements unsteady.

“Where is he?” Ashanti said.

“Tell us, and you get it back,” I said.

He called me that name again, then tried out another ugly one on Ashanti. We just stood there, not saying a word. It wasn't that we were being brave—at least in my case—more just that I was so worried and confused about Tut-Tut that I forgot to be afraid.

“All right, have it your way,” Jean-Claude said. He held out his hand. “First the card.”

I shook my head. “First the information,” said Ashanti.

Jean-Claude thought for a moment or two, then nodded. “Sure,” he said, “for what good it will do you. They've got him down at the Flatbush Family Detention Center.”

“But that's like a jail,” Ashanti said.

“Like?” said Jean-Claude. “Couldn't be liker.”

I tossed him the card, an accurate toss that he failed to catch. He bent to pick it up, and we were out of there.