The Outlaws of Sherwood Street: Giving to the Poor (9 page)

“Of course you can!” my mom said. All of a sudden she had some color in her cheeks, looked more like her usual self. “That kind of thing will be a snap for you.”

“But you're missing the point!” my dad said. “It's ghostwriting. My name won't even appear.
Dead Man's Hand
—that's the moronic title they've chosen—by George Gentry, even though he won't have written a single word.”

Normally I'm not one of those people who thinks about things in terms of numbers. But two numbers arose in my mind right away, and I couldn't get past them: eighty thousand for the dollars; and three for the months of work.

“And after this,” my mom said, “Eleanor will take on your new book?”

“She says.”

“So I'm missing the downside. You make a nice quick bundle of money and then get back to what you love doing, and with proper representation.”

I couldn't have put it better myself, in fact couldn't even have come close. I tried to memorize what my mom had just said, word for word.

Meanwhile, my dad had gone pale. “Hack work, Jane. Hack work. Didn't I make that clear? Is that what you think of me?”

“Three months, Chas, for God's sake,” my mom said. Then her voice rose in a way I'd never heard from her. “Do you think I believed in every damn deal I worked on?”

My dad's voice rose, too. “This is different.”

“How?” said my mom. “How is it different?”

“I'm an artist, that's how,” my dad said. He lowered his voice, lowered his head, too. “There, you made me say it.” He turned and hurried upstairs. My mom rose, went into the living room, closed the sliding door behind her. I sat at the table, all mixed up.

13

A
shanti called me bright and early, sounding chipper.

“You sound chipper,” I said.

“Uh-oh—did I wake you?”

“Sort of.” The truth was I'd been clinging to sleep rather than simply sleeping, in no hurry to rise and face the day. Face things like the sight of Ashanti's dad kissing that woman, something I knew and Ashanti did not. Was it my duty to tell her? Not to tell her? I didn't have a clue.

“What did your mom say?” Ashanti said.

“About what?”

“Come on. Are you in a coma? Tut-Tut, of course.”

“I didn't get a chance to bring it up.”

I expected some follow-up on that, probably annoyed, but Ashanti let it slide right by. “Doesn't matter,” she said. “I've got another idea.”

“Like?”

“Silas's dad.”

• • •

I went downstairs. No sign of anybody. My mom had left a note on the table.
Good morning, Robbie. I've taken P. for a walk. Back soon.
Under that I wrote,
Gone to the museum with Ashanti. Back later.
A voluntary trip to the museum: I could picture the expression on my mom's face when she considered that one.

Ashanti was waiting for me on the street.

“Hi,” she said. “Nice day.”

“What's nice about it?” The sky was one big dark cloud, and some strange smell was in the cold air, kind of sewery. “Why are you in such a good mood?”

“It's my natural state.”

“Coulda fooled me.”

She gazed down at me and shook her head in a tsk-tsk sort of way. “Attitude is everything in life.”

“Are you on some kind of dope?” I said.

She laughed. “More like I was a dope.”

“Huh?”

“Remember what I told you about my dad? That text?”

“Of course.”

“Well, I must've misinterpreted. Not enough data points, as they say in science class.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that my dad's being so nice to my mom lately. They're getting along like I've never seen. They shared a bottle of champagne last night, and he had flowers delivered first thing this morning.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Oh? Just oh?”

“I meant, that's nice.”

“My mom's actually up and having breakfast at this very moment. Granola with banana slices!”

“What's strange about that?”

“She never eats breakfast, hardly eats at all.”

I glanced at Ashanti. No sign of the brooding expression that so often lurked beneath the surface of her eyes. She was happy today, plain and simple. So what was I supposed to do with this data point grenade I had in my possession? Keep the pin in, Robbie. If grenades had pins: not my area of expertise. And what if I, too, was misinterpreting? Finding a way through a problem like this: also not my area of expertise. Did I even have an area of expertise, a single one? None came to mind.

• • •

My mom was a lover of museums, so I'd visited lots of them, all over the five boroughs, including the Brooklyn Museum, which Ashanti and I entered as soon as the doors opened. We paid the suggested donation for students with valid ID and went up the Arts of the Americas floor, where I'd never been.

“What would Silas do about the suggested donation thing?” I said as we rode the elevator.

“He'd suggest zero,” Ashanti said.

We walked past a bunch of Native American exhibits, didn't see Mr. Wilders; there was no one around but a tired-looking security guard pacing her way to the end of the hall and back. We gazed at a picture of a shirtless Plains Indian warrior mounted on his horse. He gazed at something in the far-off distance.

“We ground them up, but good,” Ashanti said.

“We?”

“Actually, you. My ancestors were getting ground up, too.”

“On your father's side?” I said.

“No,” Ashanti said. “Not on my father's side.” She took a deep breath, blew it out through her nose. “All this stupid history. What are we supposed to do with it? You can't fix the past. Like basketball—you miss the free throw, and that's that. Play in the now.”

We said “play in the now” together. It was a favorite motto of our coach, Ms. Kleinberg, who had a sweet and deadly jumper and had starred for Dartmouth.

“Thatcha!”

“Comin' atcha!”

We high-fived. The security guard came a few steps in our direction, and called, “Help you with something?”

“No, thanks,” I said.

We moved away. “I think she missed the irony part,” Ashanti said quietly. There were two ways of doing the Thatcha-comin'-atcha thing, straight up and ironic. Ashanti and I were the ironic types. The kids on the student council did it straight up.

“Does play in the now mean you should actually forget about history?” I said.

“Sounds wrong,” said Ashanti.

We came to the Canarsee exhibit. I kind of remembered something about the Canarsees, maybe that they were living in Brooklyn and Manhattan when the Dutch first arrived, and that was how come there's a Canarsie neighborhood in Brooklyn. An explanation on the wall told all about how the Canarsees were part of the broader Lenape people, how they'd eventually sold or traded or lost everything—mostly had it taken away, actually—and how the last survivor was thought to have died around 1830.

We gazed at the glassed-in display of Canarsee artifacts: spears, axes, beaded leather pouches, woven baskets, a drum. And a small stone head, a head with a simple engraved face: two eyes—one round, one a little irregular, a rectangular mouth, a few squiggles for the hair or else for forehead frown lines. Not much in the way of features, but somehow they seemed angry.

And just as I was thinking that, the charm began to come to life. I could feel it warming against my chest, even stirring a bit, as though moving on its own.

“Ashanti?” I said. “Something's happening.” I shifted the charm out from under my shirt and into the open. Ashanti reached out and touched it. For a moment, her face changed, twisting in a way that kind of resembled the angry stone face in the display case.

“Oh, my God,” I said.

“What?” she said, and immediately her face went back to normal. Had I imagined the whole thing? “It's warm, yeah,” she went on, “but not as hot as it used to get.”

“Right, but—”

A door just beyond the glass case opened and out came Jim Wilders—Silas's somewhat wayward dad, as he himself had put it—clipboard in hand, pencil between his teeth. His eyes, so much like Silas's, took in the scene: Ashanti and me by the glass case, the charm out in the open, her finger on it.

“Well, well,” he said. “Robbie and Ashanti—we meet again.”

“Uh,” I said, tucking the charm back under my shirt.

He glanced around. “Where's Silas?”

“At home, probably,” Ashanti said.

“For a moment, I thought he'd come to visit me at work—which would have been a first.” We had nothing to say to that. He gestured toward the display. “You're interested in the Canarsee people?”

“Kind of,” Ashanti said.

“Know much about them?”

Ashanti shrugged. “They used to live here,” she said. “In Brooklyn. Then they all died out and—”

“Died out?” said Silas's dad. I noticed his name tag read Professor Wilders. “I guess it depends on what you mean by died out. The fact is there were decades, even centuries, of mixing between native peoples and Europeans, so there's no reason to think Canarsee DNA doesn't live on.”

I took a long look at those braids, could feel Ashanti doing the same thing.

“And if their DNA,” said Mr. Wilders, “why not some of their ideas and values?”

He paused, glanced at each of us. I didn't know the answer, wasn't sure I even understood the question.

“You're saying ideas and values are in the DNA?” Ashanti said.

Wow! What a smart question! Friends: I knew how to pick 'em. And I could tell from a new expression on Wilders's face that her question sounded smart to him, too.

“I wouldn't go that far,” he said.

Ashanti's gaze shifted to his braids. “Do you have Canarsee DNA in you?”

He took a deep breath, let it slowly out. “Not to my knowledge.” He got a faraway look in his eyes; at the same time, one of his hands rose slightly and made a fist. Did he even realize it? “Let's just say that ideas and values can live on, especially if we give them a boost.”

“How?” said Ashanti.

Mr. Wilders checked his watch. “Got a minute or two? I can show you some of the stuff I'm working on.” He opened the door by the display case and ushered us through.

• • •

Backstage at the museum, if that was how to put it, the look was standard office building, the characteristic museum smell—sort of airy and marbly—disappearing at once. Wilders led us into his office, a small windowless room coldly lit with strip lights. Books and papers were stacked all over the place and the walls were covered with art—mostly photos of Indians in the old west, but also some movie posters:
Hombre, The Searchers, Little Big Man.
Mr. Wilders went over to one of those stand-up architect tables and cleared a space, revealing a big map of Brooklyn.

“Where do you kids go to school?” he said.

“Thatcher,” said Ashanti.

“That's private?” he said.

“Independent,” I told him; I liked that description much better.

Mr. Wilders gave me a quick look, like maybe he was changing his mind about me. From what to what? I had no idea. He rolled up his sleeves and turned to the architect table. His arms were sinewy and strong—but what I noticed first was bruising and scrapes around his wrists. He pointed a pencil at the map.

“Thatcher Academy,” he said. “Right about here. Not a spot that's come up yet in my research, but that doesn't mean it won't—that's one thing I've learned.”

“What research?” Ashanti said.

“See these areas shaded in yellow?” Mr. Wilders said. “Those were all places associated with Canarsee life. For example, here by this bend in the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a small village stood for the better part of a century.” He pointed the pencil tip down toward the water. “And here on a strand by Gowanus Bay, we've found extensive shell middens.”

“Shell middens?” I said.

“Just a kind of dump, really, where the villagers would deposit all their shells. But a totally organic dump, of course, without any negative consequences for the ecology.”

“Seashells?” I said.

Mr. Wilders nodded. “Clams and oysters, mostly.”

“Oysters?” I said.

“By the tens of thousands. The Canarsees loved oysters, and in those days, you didn't have to pay three or four bucks a pop in some snooty restaurant—you just waded onto the flats and scooped them up to your heart's content.” Mr. Wilders got a faraway look in his eyes. “The oysters thrived, what with the water being so pure back then. Is it too much to say that the oysters liked the water they inhabited in precolonial times, even loved it?”

Yeah, I thought it was too much. There was a silence, kind of awkward. I'm one of those people who can't take awkward silences for long. “I hear,” I said, “that the oysters are making a comeback.”

He faced me, the faraway look fading fast. “Where'd you hear that?”

“Uh, my aunt, actually. My aunt in New Jersey.”

“New Jersey,” said Mr. Wilders, his voice sharpening. “Is she an expert on shellfish?”

“Maybe not an expert,” I said. I didn't want to leave it like that, failing to stand up for my aunt. I liked Aunt Jenna. “But she taught me how to shuck them.”

Mr. Wilders's voice lost that edgy thing. “You like oysters?” he said.

“Especially with cocktail sauce.”

He turned to Ashanti. “How about you?”

Ashanti made a face. Mr. Wilders laughed. Ashanti and I joined in, a nice, tension-free moment.

“You seem like such good kids,” Mr. Wilders said, still chuckling. “So I was wondering what you thought about me getting busted at the Gunn Tower demonstration.”

My laughter cut off just like that. “I didn't know what to think,” I said.

“I felt bad for Silas,” said Ashanti.

Angry red patches appeared on Mr. Wilders's face. “Why feel bad? His father took a stand for something he believes in.” He turned and stabbed the map of Brooklyn with his finger.

“See this yellowed-in area? This huge yellowed-in area? That's where Mr. Gunn is lusting to build his tower.” He glared at us. “Have you seen pictures of the plans?”

“No.”

Mr. Wilders tapped on a keyboard. A picture popped up on a monitor, one of those artist's renderings where the sky is the bluest blue, the grass the greenest green, and the tiny people at the bottom seem full of purpose. Soaring above the tiny people on the screen was a dark tower—the windows dark, the steel dark—that made all of Brooklyn spread out below it seem small and insignificant, merely the setting for the tower, and no more.

“For comparison,” Mr. Wilders said, “here's the Empire State Building.” Gunn Tower looked to be about twice as tall. “In the early mornings, the shadow will stretch all the way across the borough and onto the East River.” I eyed the tiny people. They seemed oblivious to Gunn Tower, like it was just an ordinary tree or something. That didn't strike me as realistic. I could feel the weight of its presence from here.

“Yellowed-in means the Canarsees lived there?” I said.

“Or that it was an important place for them,” Mr. Wilders said. “That's the case here. I've established that there was a spring on this site—a stream rising out of the earth—that the Canarsees often drank from and considered sacred. It was also possibly a burial site—the gold standard for stopping development, if provable.”