The Outlaws of Sherwood Street: Giving to the Poor

by Peter Abrahams

  Here was something I was learning about Ashanti and me: our minds often seemed to be heading in the same direction. The big difference showed up when our minds got there. For example, Ashanti now leaned forward and said, “What’s the deal with your father?” Which was something I’d never have dared to ask.

  Silas, right in the middle of cracking his gum, went still. “My father?”

  “Yeah.”

  “My parents are divorced—you know that.”

  Ashanti nodded. “How come?”

  “How come my parents got divorced?” Silas said. He flushed from his neck up to the top of his forehead, all his freckles turning white at the same time. “What’s it to you?” I had some notion about that, but of course there was no way Silas could have known about the text message Ashanti had seen and what was really on her mind.

  Ashanti shrugged. “Nothing. Don’t be so touchy.”

  “Touchy?” He turned to me. “Robbie? Was I being touchy?”

  “Let’s just cool it,” I said. “We’ve got bigger problems.” I gestured at the charm. And then there was Tut-Tut, problem two. Tied for first, actually. Or maybe number one all by himself.

  Ashanti and Silas glared at each other for another second or two, then both turned to the charm.

  “How do we know it’s the same one?” Silas said.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Where’s the power?” Silas said. He poked the silver heart. “That head-zapping thing? Gonzo.” The head zap happened when the power entered you, an instant ice cream headache that faded fast. After that, the power expressed itself in different ways—mental telepathy when it came to Silas.

  “Think something, Silas,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said, “I’m thinking about the dark side of the moon.”

  “Not out loud,” I said. “And touch the charm while you’re thinking.”

  “And don’t think anything dorky,” Ashanti said.

  “What’s dorky about the dark side of the moon?” Silas shifted the space heater a little more his way.

  “Close your eyes,” I said. “Think. Not about the moon.”

  Silas closed his eyes. “Not about the moon at all, or just not the dark side?”

  “I’m going to smack you,” Ashanti said.

  Silas shrank back, closing his eyes even tighter. “No moon of any kind. No planets, no asteroids, no comets, no quasars, no—”

  “Silas!”

  “Okay, okay! All right. Here we go. Thought, coming up.”

  He went still, and certainly appeared to be thinking, but no thought jumped the gap from him to me. My mind, wide open, remained blank.

  “Ashanti?” I said. “Anything?”

  “Nope.”

  Silas opened his eyes. “You didn’t get that?” he said.

  We shook our heads.

  “What was it?” I asked Silas.

  “Do I have to tell?”

  “What is it about you, Silas?” Ashanti said.

  “Like in what way?”

  “The way that makes me want to dangle you out the window by your ankles?”

  Which was impossible, the single window here at HQ being boarded over, but Silas glanced nervously in that direction anyway.

  “Let’s try again,” I said, “this time with all of us touching the charm.”

  Not easy, what with the size of the charm, but we all managed to get a fingertip on it. Silas’s skin felt cold, Ashanti’s hot.

  “On three,” Silas said. We all closed our eyes. “Anda one, anda two, anda three!”

  At first my mind was blank again. Then, all of a sudden, I thought about my mom losing her job, but not in Silas’s voice—I hadn’t even told him about it yet. Meanwhile, Ashanti was sounding angry. “Silas—were you thinking about my mom?”

  “Huh?” said Silas. “How could I be thinking about your mom? I don’t know her from Adam.”

  We all opened our eyes.

  “You thought about your mom?” I said to Ashanti.

  She nodded.

  “So did I,” I said. “I mean, I thought about my mom, not yours.” We both turned to Silas.

  “I wasn’t thinking about anybody’s mom or moms in general.”

  “What were you thinking of?” I said.

  “Do I have to tell?” he said again. Silas could be very circular.

  “Silas?”

  “I was thinking about yo-yos,” he said quickly, “if you must know.”

  “Yo-yos?”

  “Giant yo-yos, actually,” he said. “Activated by tidal forces, they might be an efficient energy multiplier.”

  We gazed at him. Yo-yos were circular; it was sort of uncanny.

  “Just a thought,” he said. “But it didn’t get through, huh?”

  We withdrew our hands from the silver heart. It lay on the desk, looking totally everyday.

  “Let’s admit it,” Silas said. “This is not our charm.”

  “But I told you,” I said, counting off the points on my fingers. “It sort of . . . got Pendleton to lead me to that hotel.”

  “We don’t know that,” Silas said. “Dogs have a great sense of smell. And what about all the for-sure things the charm used to do? Like the soaring, the laser thing, all that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe it’s been changed.”

  “Changed?” said Ashanti.

  “Even weakened,” I went on. “From a sort of ordeal—falling to the bottom of the ocean, getting swallowed by an oyster.”

  “Or,” Silas said.

  “Or what?” I said.

  “Or maybe, you know,” Silas said, “you kind of imagined it.”

  “Imagined what? I’m telling you, I—” At that moment, I felt Ashanti’s eyes on me. I turned toward her. “You think that too? I imagined it?”

  Ashanti met my gaze, didn’t say anything.

  “Oh, my God,” I said. “You don’t even believe I found it in the oyster? You think I went out and bought it somewhere?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Ashanti said.

  “But it is an interesting idea,” said Silas.

  I rose. “So I’m lying?” I said. “What kind of friends are you?”

  Silas started flushing again. Ashanti took my arm.

  “Aw, come on,” she said. “I know you wouldn’t lie. Not on purpose.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing. Forget I said it. You’re not lying. Period.”

  “Thanks a bunch.”

  “Hey, Robbie, I’m sorry,” Ashanti said.

  I took a deep breath, tried to calm down. “You don’t need to say you’re sorry.”

  “Too late. Just sit back down. We have to think.”

  We thought. All at once, Ashanti snapped her fingers. Unlike Silas, she was one of those real talented finger snappers—it sounded like a gunshot. “I’ve got it,” she said. “We’ll invent a test for the charm. To see if it’s really real.”

  Silas rubbed his hands together. “Now we’re cooking,” he said.

  “What kind of test?”

  “Standardized,” Silas said. “Big time.”

  “Shut up,” Ashanti said. She poked the charm. “We know that the charm—the real charm—reacts to injustice, right?”

  “So we have to find an injustice to expose it to?” Silas said.

  We all thought of Tut-Tut at the exact same moment.

  10

  And 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.