The Outlaws of Sherwood Street: Giving to the Poor (3 page)

4

W
e walked away from the projects and went left at the next cross street. The sign, hanging crookedly from a single bolt, read Sherwood Street. Sherwood Street was a strange street, only a single block long, and populated by no one. On the far side stood an abandoned gas station and a fenced-in scrap metal foundry that never seemed to be open; on our side were an empty and weedy trash-strewn lot and then a huge boarded-up warehouse. Ashanti and I turned into the alley that ran along the side of the warehouse and walked to the back.

We glanced around, saw we were alone, and climbed up on the loading dock. The entrance to the warehouse was a big roll-down steel door, padlocked at the bottom, but set in the big steel door was a small door for people to use when they weren't loading or unloading. The small door no longer had a knob—a metal plate covered the hole where the knob had been—and a piece of plywood covered the window space. The first time Tut-Tut had brought me here, he'd pried the plywood off with a butter knife. Now Silas had it rigged so all you had to do was point your cell phone and press 13. Why 13? That was Silas.

I pointed my phone and pressed 13. The plywood cover swung open. Ashanti reached through the glassless space, opened the door from the inside. We entered, the plywood closing back in place automatically. Behind us a deep male voice said, “Welcome to the Casbah.” I'd freaked the first time that had happened, but it was just a sound clip from some old movie Silas had found.

It was dim inside the warehouse—just a few narrow blades of light leaking in from places where the boarding up had been a little careless—but we knew our way. We moved along a row of tall floor-to-ceiling pillars to the lift at the far side of the warehouse, a square steel slab with no doors or windows. We stepped on the slab and pressed a button on the wall, a button Tut-Tut had painted with his purple tag in tiny form:
vudu.
The steel slab shuddered and slowly rose through an opening in the ceiling.

At the floor level above, we came to a stop. We were in a small room with a desk, some office-type swivel chairs, and Tut-Tut's spray paintings on the wall: parrots, flowers, butterflies, and the
vudu
tag again, much bigger, plus portraits of Tut-Tut, his dead parents (their eyes were closed), Jean-Claude, and all of us as a group—me, Ashanti, Silas, Tut-Tut. This was HQ, the secret place Tut-Tut had found, exactly how he'd never explained. His stutter made explaining things hard, especially long, complicated stories, and he ended up getting impatient with himself. Normally we'd have had to switch on the light—a single bulb hanging from the ceiling—but it was already on and Silas was sitting at the desk, eating fast-food fries.

“My mistake, amigos,” he said. “I assumed you meant noon eastern time.”

“You've got ketchup all over your face,” Ashanti said.

Silas stuck out his tongue at a weird sideways angle, kind of like Pendleton, and licked ketchup off his cheek. It was a roundish sort of cheek, and Silas was a roundish sort of kid, red-haired with freckles and green eyes that took in everything. He had one of those very expressive faces, like an actor. Right now it was expressing self-satisfaction, maybe because he'd pulled the space heater right up beside him and was hogging all the heat.

“Planning on sharing those fries?” I said.

“Be my guest,” said Silas. “Although I should warn you I feel a cold coming on.”

I left the fries alone, but not Ashanti, who grabbed the container and dug right in. Silas frowned at her.

“What's your problem?” she said, or something like that. Hard to tell with her mouth so full.

Silas shrugged. “Eat and be merry,” he said.

But we weren't feeling merry, me and Ashanti, and neither was Silas after we told him all the news.

“Whoa,” he said. “Incoming! Incoming!” And he put his hands over his head.

“Silas?” I said. “What are you doing?”

“You dweeb,” said Ashanti.

“I'm not a dweeb,” Silas said. “Not by any kind of strict definition.”

“A geek?” said Ashanti.

Silas looked offended. “A geek,” he said, “is a drunk who bites the heads off live chickens.”

Ashanti stopped eating, put the fries on the desk.

“I'm more like a nerd,” Silas said, helping himself to another handful, “if you really have to put a label on people.”

“Sorry,” Ashanti said; kind of a surprise: had I ever heard her say sorry to anybody?

But of course Silas had to blow it. “Apology graciously accepted,” he said.

“Jerk,” Ashanti said.

“Guys?” I said. Meaning
enough.
They both turned to me. “What are we going to do?” I said.

“If only we still had the charm,” Silas said.

“If only won't get it done,” Ashanti said.

“I'm not sure it would do any good,” I told them.

“Huh?” they said.

“I mean—did we have the charm or did it have us?”

They thought about that. Then Silas said, “I still wish we had it. Maybe we could learn to scuba dive.”

“And search where?” Ashanti said.

“The bottom of the sea,” said Silas.

“But exactly where? All we know is we were out there somewhere.”

Ashanti was right about that. I could see it all, but not in the way you picture things that happened in real life, more the way you picture things that happened in a dream. One of those falling dreams in this case, falling off the helicopter deck of
Boffo,
falling and falling through the night and blowing snow, leveling out at the last moment, so close to death that my arm went plunging into the wild and icy waters, which was when I must have lost the leather bracelet with that strange silver heart.

“Maybe you're right,” Silas said. He had some sort of thought that made him frown. “Do you think the scuba diving people expect you to know how to swim?”

“You don't know how to swim?” I said.

“It never came up.”

“You've never been to the beach?” Ashanti said.

“I don't like the beach. I burn right away.” Silas stuck out his chin. “And what's wrong with indoors? Indoors is a great human invention.”

Uh-oh. Great human inventions was one of Silas's favorite topics. This wasn't the time.

“Later, Silas,” I said. “What are we going to do? That's the point.”

“Simple,” he said. “We prioritize.”

“Meaning?” I said.

“Meaning start with the most—”

“We know what prioritize means,” Ashanti said.

“Then we're all on the same page,” said Silas. “But are we in the same paragraph?” He laughed. We didn't join in. That didn't stop him. Finally he wiped away one of those laughter tears and said, “Bottom line, we have all these problems. Priority question—which one is the most important?”

“Tut-Tut,” I said.

“Prize for the little lady,” said Silas.

“Silas?” said Ashanti, in a way she had—not necessarily loud but plenty forceful—of commanding everyone's attention.

“Oops,” said Silas.

“We have to get Tut-Tut out of there,” I said.

“Spring him,” Silas said.

“Spring him?” said Ashanti.

“That's the expression for busting dudes out of jail,” Silas explained.

“But how?” I said.

We sat in silence. I gazed at Tut-Tut's spray-painted self-portrait on the wall. He seemed to be gazing right back at me. There was so much inside him, including lots of pain he'd suffered, although he didn't want anybody's sympathy; I thought I could see all that in the picture.

Silas snapped his fingers. Not one of his talents: he tried it a few more times, barely making a sound. “Anyway,” he said, giving up, “I've got it. We'll make him a green card.”

“How?”

“Nothing to it,” Silas said. “There's a bunch of good programs for that kind of thing. All we need is some green paper and—”

“Green cards aren't green,” I said.

“No?”

“And even if we had a green card, how do we get it to him?” I said.

“And even if we get it to him, then what?” says Ashanti. “He flashes it to a guard or something and the doors open, just like that?”

“Why not?” said Silas.

I didn't know the answer, but I did know that in the adult world, doors never seemed to open just like that.

We did more sitting in silence. The getting-nowhere feeling pressed down on me like a heavy cloud.
Do something, Robbie!
That was a voice inside me I sometimes heard, my own voice, often inclined to panic: the voice I thought of as the innermost Robbie.

I rose. “Let's go take a look at the Flatbush Family Detention Center.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Ashanti said.

“We're going outside?” said Silas.

We gave him a look. He got ready, meaning he buttoned up his cardigan—I'd never seen another human being in a cardigan—wrapped a scarf around his neck, struggled into his Michelin-Man-type jacket, and pulled on an Arctic-explorer-type hat with fur flaps and a pair of mittens. Yes, mittens.

• • •

The Flatbush Family Detention Center wasn't actually on Flatbush Avenue, the most important street in the borough, but a few blocks north, so we had to walk from the subway station, a slow walk, on account of a wind springing up right in our faces and the fact of Silas being too bundled up to move well. We passed a few old office low-rises and a fire station, and came to a massive brick building on a corner. It looked something like a school except that the windows were barred, the brick walls were grimier than any school walls I'd ever seen, and two cops stood by the front door. There was no sign out front.

“This is it,” Ashanti said.

The cops looked at us. We looked at them.

“Help you kids?” one of them said.

Ashanti stepped forward. “We've got a friend in there.”

“Yeah?” said the other cop.

“Yeah,” said Ashanti.

I stepped forward too, at the same time sensing Silas backing away. “We want to see him.”

“Gotta make arrangements,” the second cop said.

“How?” I said.

“Go online,” said the first cop. “Click on visitation.”

“Okay,” said Silas, behind us. “Thanks.”

We walked away, not in the direction we'd come from; I had some vague feeling about going around the corner, checking out the rest of the building.

Behind me, Ashanti said, “You came close to saying ‘thanks, officer,' didn't you?”

“No way,” Silas said. “Plus, how I said thanks was loaded with contempt.”

“Right,” Ashanti said. “They're probably discussing whether or not to cuff you.”

Silas whipped around, looked back.

• • •

We turned the corner, kept going, the grimy wall looming above us. Halfway down the block, we came to an archway in the wall, maybe once an entrance for deliveries. The opening was barred now by crisscrossing black metal bars so close together you probably couldn't have squeezed your head through. Beyond the bars, at the far end of the covered barrel space of the arch, were more crisscrossing bars in the same arrangement, and beyond those bars lay a small and treeless paved yard, no one in it. At least no one in the part I could see, almost like a narrow stage framed by the sides of the archway.

“Come on,” Silas said. “I'm freezing.”

I ignored him, but glanced over at Ashanti. She was stamping her feet, maybe feeling the cold, too. For some reason, I did not.

“Anyone carrying green?” Silas said. “Hot chocolate would go down real nice. With a marshmallow on top.”

At that moment, from offstage, if that's how to put it, a rock or maybe a chunk of broken pavement came bouncing across the yard. Then a small figure in a hoodie that was much too big for him came into view and gave the rock a kick. He moved after it, not looking at us: a small figure in a too-big hoodie, torn jeans—nothing hip or cool about those tears—and my old white sneakers with the blue trim, both of them now laceless. And no socks, despite the cold. That—the no socks part—bothered me more than anything, kind of crazy. I called his name.

“Tut-Tut.”

5

T
ut-Tut turned quickly, and the look on his face—or more accurately the way it changed, from deep inward sadness and worry to pure joy—was something I know I'll never forget. He ran to the inner barrier, grabbed the bars and said, “R-r-r-r-r-r-.” Words starting with
R
were extra hard for Tut-Tut, even in those rare periods when his speech came a little more easily. Not counting the times when the silver heart had worked its magic: then I'd heard him really speak. The very first word he'd uttered, maybe in his whole life, was
ow.

We all pressed up against the outer barrier, meaning Tut-Tut was about ten or fifteen feet away.

“Tut-Tut,” Ashanti said, “how are you?”

I could see how he was: too skinny, those cheekbones too prominent now, plus his dreads seemed limp and lifeless and even dirty—and maybe worst of all—his lip was split.

“G—,” he said, “g-g-g-g-g-g-g—”

But of course he was just about the furthest thing from good.

“Hey,” Silas said, “what happened to your lip?”

Tut-Tut's face darkened, but only for a moment and then he shook it off, looking happy again. “N-n-n-n-n-n-n-no-noth-th-th-th-th-,” he said. “I-I-I-I'm o-o-k-k-k-k-k—”

“What's going on in this place, Tut-Tut?” I said. “Is anyone helping you?”

“N-n-n-n-n—”

“But they must tell you something,” I said, “like about what's happening—you know, the, um . . .”

“Procedures,” Silas said.

“Yeah,” I said. “There must be some kind of procedures.” That was one thing I'd learned: the adult world had procedures for just about everything. And here's another: some people, like Sheldon Gunn, for example, were way better than others at making the whole procedure thing work for them.

“P-p-p-p-pr-pr-pr-,” Tut-Tut said. Then he made his hand into a gun and shot some imaginary thing in the air, most likely the whole concept of procedures. I laughed, even though there was nothing funny about this situation, the exact opposite. And when I laughed, Tut-Tut smiled—wincing a bit on account of his split lip—and then he stuck his hand, sort of grayish from the cold, through one of the small squares formed by the crisscrossing bars, and gave a little wave. Meanwhile his split lip had opened up and blood was oozing out; he didn't seem to notice.

“We've got to get you out,” Ashanti said.

“H-h-h-h-h-,” said Tut-Tut. His stuttering had never been so bad.

How. That was the question all right. Then an idea hit me, kind of late arriving considering my mom's job. “Have you got a lawyer?” I said.

He shook his head.

“But you must have a lawyer,” I said.

Tut-Tut made the gesture for money, rubbing his thumb and index finger together.

“They have to give you a lawyer,” I said, turning to the others. “Don't they? It's on all the cop shows.”

“We don't have a TV,” Silas said. “Didn't I ever mention that?”

“But you must know about Miranda,” Ashanti said.

“Who's she?” said Silas.

The flip side of Silas knowing stuff no one else did was that he didn't know stuff that was common knowledge and took no effort to learn, like celebrity divorce news, for example.

“Miranda rights,” Ashanti said. “Or maybe it was the Gideon case. We took this in class, but Mr. Stinecki had a bad cold that day and no one could understand him. The point is that criminals have the right to a lawyer even if they can't pay.”

“Tut-Tut's not a criminal,” I said.

Tut-Tut shook his head vigorously. He was no criminal. So what was he doing behind bars?

“Tut-Tut,” I said, “I'm going to talk to my mom—I'm sure she'll know the right kind of lawyer.” Somewhere out of sight a loud buzzer went off. Tut-Tut glanced to the side in the direction the sound had come from.

“G-g-g-g-g . . .” What was it going to be? Got to go? Good-bye? I didn't know. Tut-Tut tried and tried to get it out, and then gave up and did something I'd never seen him do before, namely pound his fist into his open hand, totally frustrated.

From somewhere in the yard came a man's yell. “Hey! Don't hear so good? Move!”

Tut-Tut turned to go.

“Wait,” Ashanti said. “Silas—those stupid mittens—toss them to Tut-Tut.”

“My mittens?”

“You can get new ones.”

“But—”

Ashanti grabbed the mittens right off Silas's hands, folded one into the other, made a sort of ball. This wasn't going to be easy, but Ashanti pretty much made it look that way. She stuck her arm through one of the barred squares and backhanded the mitten ball right through a square on the other side. Tut-Tut caught it.

“Th-th-th-th-th—”

“I have to say it once more, you ain't gonna like it,” the unseen man called.

Tut-Tut gave us another tiny wave, and then he was gone. Silas stuffed his bare hands deep into his pockets.

• • •

We got off the train, climbed up to street level, Silas headed one way, me and Ashanti in another. As we parted, Silas said, “You guys thinking what I'm thinking?”

“If it's about your mittens, I'm going to smack you,” Ashanti said.

Silas stepped back. “I was thinking—what's the melting temperature for those metal bars? Tut-Tut's pretty small—we'd probably only have to melt through one or two.”

“Sounds interesting,” I said.

“It does?” said Ashanti.

But Silas looked pleased. The lawyer idea was plan A, but how could it hurt to have a backup?

Ashanti and I walked home. We actually live on the same block, practically across the street from each other. Ashanti's mom was maybe the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen; she'd been a model but had now aged out of the modeling business and didn't seem to go out much. Her dad was a film editor who traveled a lot; I still hadn't met him.

We came to Monsieur Señor's, this coffee place where my dad often wrote when he got sick of being home alone. I didn't see him in there now, but Monsieur Señor's had these little chocolate mint squares I loved.

“Wanna grab something to eat?” I said.

“I'm not hungry.”

I glanced over at Ashanti. Her eyes had a faraway look.

“You ready to tell me whatever it is you're not telling me?” I said.

“You're so damn persistent,” she said. “If you must know—”

“Hey! I don't need to know—”

“I think my dad's . . . seeing someone.”

“Seeing someone?” I said. “What does that mean?”

“Come on! Seeing someone, for God's sake,” Ashanti said, her voice rising in real fury. “Do I have to spell it out? Another woman.”

“He's having an affair?”

“What a stupid expression!” Ashanti said.

I started getting angry, too. “That's not my fault—I didn't make it up. It's the expression.”

Ashanti glared down at me. Then her face changed completely, and she actually started to laugh. “What is it about you?” she said.

“Huh?”

She shook her head, made a fist, tapped me lightly on the shoulder. “Thatcha,” she said.

I tapped her back. “Comin' atcha,” I said. That was a school-spirity thing we did at Thatcher, always with an ironic undertone, very Thatcherite, as I was learning fast.

Ashanti took a deep breath, let it out slowly in a round breath cloud that rose like a balloon. “Maybe it's not true,” she said. “But I can't think of another explanation.”

“For what?”

“This text I saw on his phone.”

“You were snooping on his phone?”

“Hell, no. But he left it in the bathroom, right by the sink, and it beeped while I was brushing my teeth, practically right in my face. And the message was, quote, miss u so much!!! Three exclamation marks.”

I thought that over, hoping to come up with some harmless explanation, like . . . but I couldn't. So why did I then hear myself saying, “I'm sure there's a harmless explanation.”

“Like?”

“I'll think of one,” I said.

“When you do, let me know.” Ashanti turned and climbed up the stairs to her front door, moving much slower and heavier than normal. I went home.

• • •

At this hour, mid-afternoon on a weekday, you might find my dad at home, in the office, gazing at the screen or rearranging Post-it Notes on his storyboard wall or in the kitchen taking a coffee break, but you'd never find my mom. Associates in big Manhattan law firms like Jaggers and Tulkinghorn worked long hours. My mom hardly ever got home before seven and usually put in another hour or two after dinner. So seeing them both at the kitchen table was a surprise.

They turned to me as I came in. Then came another surprise: my mom had been crying. Uh-oh. My very first thought? My dad was having an affair. Which was impossible. That wasn't my dad, and besides, my parents loved each other a lot. I was surer of that than just about anything in my whole life, so sure I didn't even question why I was so sure.

“Mom? Dad? Is something wrong?”

They looked at each other, then back at me. Both my parents are young looking for their ages—forty-one for my mom, thirty-nine for my dad—but especially my dad, with his unlined face and thick hair, scruffy like a hipster college kid and untouched by gray. All of a sudden and for no reason, I found myself wishing he looked older, a totally whacked-out thought.

“I guess we should tell her,” my dad said.

“What?” I said. “Tell me what?” Had someone died, someone closer to my mom than my dad? Nonna! Nonna was my grandmother on my mom's side, lived in Arizona, played golf every day and also went to Zumba and Pilates classes, and hadn't even been sick, at least not that I'd known, but car accidents happened, and Nonna always drove too fast, and—

My mom licked her lips. “I,” she began, then started again. “I've been let go.”

Let go? Was that the gentler way of saying . . . “Fired?” I said. And regretted it immediately. How harsh it must have sounded, completely unintended: all I'd been trying to do was get an exact grip on what being let go meant.

My mom's eyes filled with tears, but they didn't spill out, and she made no crying sound, which I sensed was all about appearing strong in front of me, a major act of will on her part, even heroic. “Yes,” she said. “Fired.”

“But how can they do that, Mom?” I remembered something about how well her last review had gone. “You're so great at your job, and you work so hard.” I actually threw in a forbidden adjective between
so
and
hard,
but they didn't seem to catch it.

“You're damn right,” my dad said.

“Chas,” my mom said, “I already told you—none of that factors in. They got rid of thirty-five associates today, as well as forty-two paralegals and support staff, plus five partners, which is practically unheard of.”

“But why, Mom? Is it the economy?” I would have had trouble defining economy in good Thatcherite style. Summing up my knowledge, the economy was bad, had been bad for a long time, and angry people were always arguing about it on the channels I didn't watch.

“Partly the economy, yes,” my mom said. “Revenues are way down.”

“Revenues?”

“The money coming into the firm from work we—from the work done.”

Less revenue meant you fired people? Out of the blue came the kind of thought I never had, namely the logical solution to a big problem. “Instead of firing people, why don't all the lawyers just take less pay till things get better?”

“Exactly!” my dad said. “Right on the nail! And here's the answer to your question, Robbie, in five letters—
G-R-E
-
E
-
D.
”

My mom held up her hand. “Pointless to get into all that. It won't help. And it's even possible that something of that nature could have happened, but not after the Sheldon Gunn fiasco.”

My heart went from beating away like normal, meaning I was unaware of it, to a pounding in my chest that couldn't be ignored. “Sheldon Gunn fiasco?” I said.

“I'm sure I mentioned it,” my mom said. “The day after the snowstorm, when the New Brooklyn Redevelopment Project deal fell apart, he fired us—and he was one of our biggest clients, worth millions to the firm every year.”

“I never understood why it fell apart in the first place,” my dad said.

But I sure did.

“It was the financing,” my mom said. “His Saudi partners backed out.”

“Why?”

“Something to do with our—Christ, I'll have to stop saying that—with the Jaggers and Tulkinghorn capital formation department and Egil Borg's people, but I don't really know. I never worked on any of it.”

Egil Borg: a nasty and dangerous man I'd never wanted to think of again. I went over and hugged my mom. “It's so unfair. You had nothing to do with it.”

“Collateral damage,” my mom said. A few tears did come after that, my mom's and mine, too. My dad got up and patted our backs.