The Outlaws of Sherwood Street: Giving to the Poor (6 page)

10

A
nd another thing,” Silas said, as we walked toward the subway entrance, the wind funneling down the street, right in our faces, “where's the leather bracelet the charm used to hang from?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Probably on the bottom of the ocean. What difference does it make?”

“Maybe a shark ate it,” Silas said.

“So?” I said.

“Nothing,” said Silas. “Just brainstorming.”

“Brainstorming is a group activity,” Ashanti said. “You can't brainstorm on your own.”

“I do it all the time,” Silas said.

“Snot's hanging out of your nose,” Ashanti said.

We entered the station, swiped our cards—Silas didn't have one, so I swiped for him, too—and jumped on a train. Silas wiped his nose on the back of one of his mittens.

“You got new mittens?” I said. His mittens were brown, the same color as those he'd given Tut-Tut, but a price tag hung from one of them.

“Yeah,” he said. “Like 'em?”

“What's wrong with gloves?” Ashanti said.

“Where do you want me to start?” said Silas.

“Nowhere.”

At that moment, a red-eyed toothless man entered from the next car, shuffling to some rhythm in his head and shaking a paper cup. Nobody in the car put any money in it; they all just stared straight ahead like they couldn't see him, one of those city techniques we all learn young. My parents said giving money to street people was really not a good way to help them, but I sometimes did anyway—just a quarter or two—which maybe had something to do with why I'd gotten the charm in the first place.

I know you. You're the girlie who dropped eighty-five cents in the cup. And sixty another time.

But not to this guy: he was too scary. He came to the end of the car, shuffled into the next one.

Ashanti glanced around, spoke low so no one but us could hear. “Did it do anything when he went by?” Ashanti said.

“The charm?” I said. “I didn't feel anything.” I put my hand in my pocket, felt it: body temperature.

“Maybe you should wear it on this,” Ashanti said, taking off her little gold neck chain.

“Oh, no,” I said. “I couldn't do that.”

“Because silver doesn't match with gold?” Silas said. We both looked at him. “Just trying to understand girls,” he explained. “Your thought processes, that kind of thing.”

I started laughing. Not in a mocking way or anything like that. It was just plain funny. Ashanti joined in. We laughed and laughed.

“What's funny?” Silas said. “It can't be done—right?—understanding girls? Is that the joke? Am I close?” Now he laughed too, and also started looking pretty pleased with himself. Ashanti took the charm, hooked it onto the necklace, clasped it around my neck. It felt good.

We rolled into a station, squealed to a stop, maybe squealing even louder than usual. The doors opened. There were people on the platform but none of them got on. The doors stayed open. An announcement came over the speakers. For some reason, my parents could never make out a single word of these subway announcements. This one was all about some problem down the track and our train no longer being in service. We went up to the street and headed for a station with access to other lines.

It happened to be the nearest station to Thatcher, less than two blocks from the school, meaning we had to go right past the corner where the homeless woman had dropped the charm, which might have seemed strange since I'd just been thinking about her, but for some reason did not, even seemed right. What would happen if I walked right over the exact spot in the gutter where it had fallen? Would the charm just hang there around my neck or would it . . . do something?

No way to find out. Police barricades were up all around the corner, and some kind of demonstration was going on. Not a big one: maybe a dozen people, a few carrying homemade signs reading
SLOW DOWN—GREED KILLS
and
SAVE OUR NEIGHBORHOOD
. On the other side of the barricade, the nearby buildings were all blocked off by scaffolding that must have gone up over the weekend. A bunch of cops—way more cops than demonstrators—stood in front of the barricades. Behind the barricades, I caught glimpses of a cameraman shooting an interview. The interviewer, wearing a red leather jacket and a long black scarf, was Dina DeNunzio. She seemed to be interviewing two people. One, bareheaded, his longish silver hair ruffling in the wind, was Sheldon Gunn. The other, a tall, golden-haired woman with a strong-featured face, looked familiar.

We went closer, crossing the street and standing just behind the demonstrators. I didn't know about Ashanti and Silas, but for me it was like being pulled by a magnet.

“Who's that blond woman?” I said.

“She's not really blond,” Ashanti said. “I saw this whole thing on Celebuzz.”

“What's that?” said Silas.

“This stupid site,” I said. “But who is she?”

“The mayor,” Ashanti said.

“The mayor of New York?”

“The one and only,” said Ashanti. “Bought with her own money, as Mr. Stinecki says.”

Silas stood on his tiptoes, tried to see better, lost his balance. “What's going on?” he said.

One of the demonstrators turned to us. He wore his hair in two long braids, some white hairs woven in with others that were sort of a faded reddish.

“Desecration,” he said.

Which was a word I didn't know, leaving me in the dark.

Maybe this guy realized that, because he went on, “He wants to block the sun.”

“Who?” I said.

“Block the sun?” said Silas, frowning the way he did when some objection was forming in his mind.

The braided guy, who hadn't noticed Silas till that point—his focus being more on me and Ashanti—turned to him. “That's the psychological underpinning—to replace the gods and become them yourself.” He was a real fast talker, like he could hardly keep up with what was unfolding in his mind. “In more pedestrian terms, Sheldon Gunn, fresh off the New Brooklyn fiasco, traded a boatload of air rights he controlled in Manhattan for permission to build the tallest tower in America, right here in Brook—” He blinked once or twice, looking confused. “Silas?” he said.

“Huh?” said Silas.

The braided guy's eyes softened. He bent down a bit, hands on his knees, eye level with Silas. “You've grown,” he said.

Their two faces were close together. Silas had a round face, while the man's face was kind of long, plus there were other differences, like Silas basically had a cheerful face and this man did not, but there was one amazing similarity. Maybe it's not nice to separate people's physical features into good and bad, and therefore I'm not always nice, because it's a habit I fall into sometimes, and in Silas's case, his best feature was his eyes. They were a very light brown, almost honey-colored, and quite prominent without being the stick-out-too-much kind. The eyes of the braided guy were just about identical.

“D-d-,” Silas began, and for a crazy second I had the whacked-out thought that the charm was not only back in action but had turned against us, its first nasty trick being to spread Tut-Tut's stuttering to Silas. But the truth was almost stranger than that. “D-Dad?” Silas said.

“What?” said Ashanti. I gave her a quick elbow jab of the silencing type.

“It's, uh, been some time,” said the guy, speaking more slowly now, and way less confidently. “Perhaps—no, quite certainly—too long a time.”

Silas drew back. His round face wasn't so round all of a sudden. He almost looked like another kid, a much harder one. “Too long a time for what?” he said.

“For a get-together.”

“Get-together?”

“A visit, maybe an outing of sorts.” The braided guy bit his lip, chapped and cracked from the cold. “How's—how's your mother?”

“Ask her,” Silas said, staring right into the braided guy's eyes. The braided guy—no doubt in my mind now that he was Silas's dad—looked away. Silas—this super-Silas or maybe anti-Silas—gestured at our surroundings. “And isn't this an outing?”

Silas's dad winced like he'd felt a sudden pain. “Well, yes, but not exactly what I meant.” Some kind of uproar started up over by the barricades, with lots of shouting and nasty words. Silas's dad glanced quickly around. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

Silas shrugged. “Just hangin' out with my friends.” Another super-Silas remark, almost cool. What was with him?

“Are you going to introduce me?” his dad said.

“Sure,” said Silas. “These are a couple of my friends.”

“Hi,” his dad said to me and Ashanti. “I'm Jim Wilders, Silas's somewhat wayward father.”

“Robbie,” I said. “Um, nice to meet you.”

“Ashanti,” said Ashanti, adding, “What are air rights?” in that direct way of hers.

“Good question,” Mr. Wilders said. “The people who used to live right here where we're standing—my people—never even thought of owning a piece of the earth, let alone its air. Now owning air is just one more way to leverage money out of nothing. Sheldon Gunn makes the money, the mayor gets his support, and the rich swarm into this neighborhood, forcing out the poor. That's the system.”

“Your people?” I said. “Did you used to live here or . . .”

Silas was shaking his head in a disgusted sort of way.

“I'm talking spiritually,” Mr. Wilders said, “which seems to annoy Silas, just the way it annoyed his—”

A gust of wind blew across the street, parting my jacket and lifting the charm up around to the side of my neck. Mr. Wilders's eyes locked on it right away. I straightened out the chain and pulled the charm back down, closing my jacket. Mr. Wilders seemed about to ask me something, but at that moment a bunch of cops came toward us from the barricades.

“Off the street! Everybody off the street!”

The demonstrators didn't move. Mr. Wilders wheeled around, his braids flying, planted himself right in front of the biggest cop and bellowed, “This is our street. We have every right.”

“Telling you one more time.”

Wilders turned up the volume even more. “We have every right.”

In a flash, the cops were on him. There was a big struggle, furious words getting shouted back and forth, and then they clamped the cuffs on him. As they dragged him away to an NYPD van, he looked at Silas, his eyes full of complicated emotions I didn't understand. Silas looked away.

The crowd, with us in it, got pushed back onto the sidewalk, clearing the way for Sheldon Gunn, the mayor, and other well-dressed people to drive off in limos. That was when I finally noticed the most obvious thing about the whole scene, what anyone else would have noticed from the get-go, namely the yellow crane that rose high above the scaffolding, bearing a huge red banner with gold lettering:
GUNN TOWER.
It snapped so loudly in the wind I could hear it from way down on the ground.

I lowered my eyes, found Dina DeNunzio among the people still by the barricades, watched her getting into the TV truck. A mistake: some people knew when they were being watched. Dina was one of them. She paused, scanned our side of the street, looked me right in the eye. Then she raised up her index finger to the driver, like she was telling him to wait.

“Let's go,” I said.

Ashanti was on the move at once, but Silas, gazing at his feet, hadn't heard. I took him by the hand. We went.

• • •

“Silas?” I said when we'd gone a few blocks. “What's the story?”

“Huh?”

Ashanti, still a step or two in front of us, stopped, turned, and put a hand on Silas's chest. “Someone as smart as you can't play dumb. It just won't fly.”

“
You
think I'm smart?” Silas said.

“Shut up,” she told him. “Shut up and spill the beans.”

“About what?”

“The dude with the braids, of course,” Ashanti said. “Is he really your father?”

Silas gave a little nod.

“And?”

“And they got divorced, like I already maybe mentioned.”

“Know something?” Ashanti said. “You're the most pigheaded person I ever met.”

“Then allow me to introduce you to yourself,” said Silas.

“Whoa,” I said. “Just stop, both of you.” I tugged them into the recessed doorway of an out-of-business clothing store. We were sheltered from the wind in a quiet little space, close together, our breath clouds merging into one. “Let's have it, Silas,” I said.

“In A-through-Z format, if possible,” Ashanti added.

Silas thought about that. I could see he was very upset, but still his mind couldn't help running on Silas-type tracks. At that moment, I liked him a whole lot.

“Z would have to be the divorce,” he said. “And we'll make A when they met, my mom and him, which was in college. How about F for when Thaddeus came along, and X for me, four years later? In between F and X was when he went to grad school—totally supported by my mother—and got obsessed with Native American history. Like, to the point of wanting to be Indian himself. He did all this research and, for a while, thought he'd found a Mohawk ancestor, but it all fell apart, and after that, he started to get mean. My mom—call this Y—told him he should see a therapist. He hit her—”

“Oh, my God!” Ashanti and I said, speaking as one.

“And she threw him out. Z.”

“That's terrible,” I said.

Silas shrugged. “It was tough on Thaddeus,” he said. “I was too young to get affected.” But as he spoke, tears welled up and spilled down his cheeks. He didn't make a crying sound, or even look particularly sad, but those tears kept coming. Ashanti wrapped her arms around him and then tilted her head down a bit—she was much taller than Silas—and kissed him on the forehead. Silas looked shocked. His tears dried up fast.