The Outlaws of Sherwood Street: Giving to the Poor

by Peter Abrahams

  “Hey, Alexei,” said Kolnikov, speaking quietly in his phone. And then came a whole lot of talk in Russian. You heard Russian in Brooklyn from time to time—say, if you went down to Brighton Beach for a swim in the summertime—but you had to be prepared for the fact that Russian men and American men have very different ideas on the proper size for a bathing suit. The American way is better; let’s leave it at that.

  I heard the squeak of the kitchen door opening, and then came footsteps. From where I sat, I could see only the feet and lower legs of the waitress: she wore paint-stained sneakers and black leggings.

  “Care to see the lunch menu?” she said.

  “I am on phone,” said Kolnikov.

  A slight pause, and then the waitress said, “I’ll just leave it with you, then.” And she put the menu on the table; pretty much slapping it down, actually—I heard the sound distinctly. Kolnikov went back to talking in Russian, with a word or two in English sometimes popping up: “money,” “tower,” “kids.”

  Whoa. Kids? What was that all about? I strained to listen but no more English words went by. Soon I heard footsteps again, this time coming from the front of the restaurant. Another pair of legs appeared, a man’s legs. His shoes were black leather, rich and gleaming, with a pattern of tiny round holes in the toe caps; I smelled the shoe polish. His pants were deep navy in color, with a faint pinstripe pattern, the fabric dense and almost like something alive.

  Kolnikov quickly said something that sounded like “Poka,” and clicked off. His seat squeaked, maybe because he’d turned to look up at the newcomer. “Good morning,” he said.

  The newcomer stepped out of my view, turning to sit opposite Kolnikov in his booth. “What say we skip the pleasantries?” he said in a low voice. “What the hell is going on?” A voice I knew well and would never forget: the voice of Sheldon Gunn.

  “To business, then,” Kolnikov said, not sounding at all put off by Gunn’s rudeness. “The American way. In Russia, we too have our ways.”

  “I’m aware of that,” said Sheldon Gunn. “I’m starting to think they’re superior.”

  Kolnikov laughed. “This remark I will pass on to my principals in Moscow.” He stopped laughing, lowered his voice. “And now I come to troublesome professor, handled in the Moscow way.”

  “No need for me to the know the details, Kolnikov,” Gunn said. “As long as your work leaves no traces.”

  Kolnikov was silent for a moment.

  “You’re hesitating?” Gunn said.

  “Traces are always possible in a world of more than one being,” Kolnikov.

  “Skip the philosophy,” Gunn said. “Are you telling me we have a problem?”

  “Skip philosophy is not Russian thought,” Kolnikov said. “But no, no problem, exactly. We now have ruling death by accident.”

  “That’s better. Clumsy fellow lost his footing?”

  “Da,” said Kolnikov. “But we still have potentiality of issue.”

  “What issue?”

  “Is complex,” Kolnikov said. “First is research of professor into subject of—”

  He broke off. The paint-spattered sneakers and black leggings—all I could see of the waitress—reappeared.

  “Hi,” she said, her body turned toward Gunn. “A menu?”

  “Coffee,” Gunn said.

  “Dark roast, medium Guatemalan, Ugandan fair trade mountain light, Vienna—?” she began.

  “Coffee,” Gunn said. “Fresh. Hot.”

  “For me, espresso,” said Kolnikov. “Double.”

  The waitress spun on her heel and went away; an angry kind of spin. The restaurant experience from down on the floor was a whole new thing.

  “Go on,” Gunn said.

  “Indian research is first issue,” Kolnikov said. “Your professor friend—”

  “He was no friend of mine.”

  “Slight joke,” Kolnikov said. “Americans are big fans of humor, no?”

  “Not this American,” said Gunn. “Get back to the research.”

  Kolnikov was silent for a moment. I was starting to learn that there are many different silences: this was the annoyed kind. Kolnikov cleared his throat, maybe getting rid of the feelings he was holding in.

  “The professor was making research into former burial grounds,” he said. “Sacred burial grounds, if you understand my meaning.”

  Gunn banged his fist on the table. “What a totally bogus reason for stopping a project of this magnitude! All these idiot causes end up doing is raising the cost—passed onto the end user, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “So—is there anything to his research?” Gunn said. “Did he have the goods?”

  “This is potentiality issue. I do not believe he had goods, but is not sure thing. I am guessing he was in process of searching for goods when I—when unfortunate accident happened.”

  “I don’t believe in guesswork.”

  “Same with me,” Kolnikov said. “We are peas in pod in that respect.”

  “I wouldn’t—” Gunn began, cutting himself off when the waitress reappeared.

  She set the drinks on table and said, “Anything else?”

  “No,” said Gunn.

  Not no thank you; just no. Kolnikov made no reply at all. I decided right then that waitressing would be a career path I’d try to avoid. She ripped the check off her pad. It entered my field of view as she laid it, harder than necessary, on the table.

  After she’d gone, Gunn said, “I can’t depend on guesswork. You’re saying it’s possible some sort of deal-breaking remnants are buried down there?”

  “Is possible.”

  “Then we have to do something,” Gunn said. “Something definitive.”

  “Definitive is meaning?”

  “Settling things once and for all.”

  Another silence, the thoughtful kind. “Detonation, perhaps?” Kolnikov said after a while.

  “Detonation?”

  “Deep down under. Speciality of my company, in fact, but all inclusive in price.”

  “Hmmm,” Gunn said. “Deep down under—I like the sound of that.”

  “No sound,” said Kolnikov. “Is beauty of it.”

  Gunn laughed. I’d never heard him laugh before, wasn’t sure at first it was laughter I was hearing now, so harsh and grating. “You are a funny guy,” Gunn said.

  “Is mutual,” Kolnikov told him.

  Gunn stopped laughing. “No witnesses,” he said. “That’s crucial.”

  “Bringing us to potentiality issue number two,” said Kolnikov. “The snooping wretches.”

  “What snooping wretches are you talking about?”

  “These kids.”

  I went cold.

  “Kids?” Gunn said. “What kids?”

  I leaned closer, straining my hardest to listen, not to miss a word, a syllable. But Kolnikov said nothing. Why not? The explanation quickly arrived: more footsteps came pattering in from the front door. A man and woman appeared, or rather, the lower halves of them, the man wearing clogs and jeans, the woman in thigh-high leather boots. They stopped at my table and the woman said, “How about here?”

  “Sure,” the man said.

  They started squeezing into the booth: my booth. I was so caught up in avoiding their feet, shifting toward the wall as far as I could, making myself small, that I almost missed the fact that there was something familiar about the man’s voice.

  Or maybe not. I couldn’t be sure. And what about Gunn and Kolnikov? That was the point. I was missing important stuff, almost certainly about me and the outlaws. I cocked my ear toward the next booth. They no longer seemed to be talking. Why not? Had I already missed Kolnikov’s answer? What did he know? It must have been a lot—why else would he have chased me? Speak! But Kolnikov did not speak, at least not loudly enough for
me to hear, and neither did Gunn. Instead I heard the scrape of their shoes on the floor, and the next thing I knew, they were on their feet and walking right past my booth. Not shoes in Kolnikov’s case: he wore boots, and left muddy tracks, a strange very darkish mud unlike any I’d seen before—except for once.

  No time to get into that now. They were leaving the restaurant! Somehow I had to follow them! But how could I get out from under the table without being seen by this couple, and in the resulting fuss Gunn and Kolnikov would turn and see me, and then . . . I didn’t know what would happen then, didn’t want to know. If I waited till the couple had done eating, Gunn and Kolnikov would be long gone. What about waiting only a minute or two, time enough for them to get outside? Would it matter by then if I drew attention to myself here in the restaurant, shooting out from under the table? What if the restaurant people thought I was some kind of thief? Yikes. It was actually sort of true. All these thoughts were zipping back and forth across my mind when the man sitting in my booth—just a foot or so away, his knee practically in my face—spoke.

  “I’m so happy,” he said. “So miserably happy.”

  The woman laughed, a low, warm sort of laugh. “I’m just plain happy. Do you realize this is our first real breakfast together? A real, proper breakfast in a restaurant?”

  I missed whatever the man’s answer was because of how hot I suddenly was, my face burning. Did I know the man’s voice? Oh, yeah, for absolute sure. It was the voice of Ashanti’s dad. As for the woman, her voice was entirely new to me and was absolutely not the voice of Ashanti’s mom—as if their conversation would have even made sense in that case. I actually felt dizzy, first time in my life that had happened while I was sitting down. I took a deep breath, and as I did, the woman’s booted foot moved, and started feeling around like . . . like she wanted to play footsie or something, which made me want to puke. Her toe bumped the metal center column that held up the table top, and maybe she decided that was his knee, because she gently lowered her foot. But it wasn’t his knee, and therefore what she lowered her foot on was the heavy round base of the column, which happened to be where the discarded french fry lay. She stepped right on it, squishing the french fry flat, and sending a tiny spray of ketchup right onto my face.

  “Ew,” she said.

  “What?” said the man—not the man, but Ashanti’s father. “Is something wrong?”

  “I just stepped on something icky.”

  Icky? A grown woman just said icky? But no time to reflect on that, because all of a sudden, she was shifting around in her seat and—was it possible? Yes! She was about to peer down under the table to see the exact nature of the ickiness she’d stepped on.

  I shrank against the wall, getting as deep as I could into the shadows. The woman’s face appeared; the face of the woman I’d seen Ashanti’s dad kissing on the street. She was pretty—but nothing like the amazing beauty Ashanti’s mom had been and still sort of was—and much younger than I’d thought, maybe under thirty, although the ages of adults were hard to guess. But the main point: she was a lot younger than Ashanti’s father.

  She peered under the table, shifted her foot to see under it. “French fry,” she said, her head then starting to turn in my direction—but at the same time rising up, out of sight. I resumed breathing, and was about to move back to a more comfortable position when Ashanti’s father gently put his foot down on hers.

  He sighed. “This is so nice,” he said. “I just wish—”

  “Let’s not talk about the future,” the woman said. “We should enjoy the time we’ve got right now.”

  There was a pause. Then Ashanti’s dad said, “I love you,” his voice thickening up.

  “I love you, too,” she said.

  My face heated up again, even hotter than before. I didn’t want to hear another word, just wanted to be out of there and right away. But how? Charm! Get me out of here! No reaction from the charm. The waitress returned and said, “Menus?”

  “Please,” said Ashanti’s dad and his . . . girlfriend? Was that the right word? “Anything you’d recommend?”

  How polite he was being, especially compared to Gunn and Kolnikov. I hated him anyway.

  But his approach softened up the waitress. “The Provençal omelet is great,” she said. “The chef sprinkles on a truffle infusion.”

  “Sounds perfect,” Ashanti’s dad said.

  “Same for me,” said the girlfriend. “Plus a two percent double-shot vanilla latte.”

  Something about that made Ashanti’s dad laugh.

  “Stop,” the girlfriend said. “Just stop.”

  The waitress went away.

  “You’re funny, that’s all,” said Ashanti’s dad.

  “Funny good or bad?”

  “Good. The best.”

  They were quiet until the food came. From what I could see of their body positions, I got the idea they were holding hands across the table. I supposed that this was one of the those comfortable silences you hear about; but horribly uncomfortable for me, physically—all scrunched up under the table—and mentally.

  They ate. They talked about truffles. Ashanti’s dad mentioned an idea for a car commercial he was editing. The girlfriend told him it was brilliant. He told her the inspiration was something she’d said the other night.

  “Oh, go on,” she said.

  He laughed. She joined in. Then he sighed. “I just wish—”

  “No,” she said, maybe placing her finger across his lips. “No thinking about the future. No worries.”

  No thinking about the future? No worries? Was she nuts?

  Days went by. Maybe weeks. Finally they paid the bill, he took his foot off hers, and they left. I counted silently to sixty and inched out to where I had a view of the surrounding booths. Coast clear. I scrambled up and hurried toward the door. Behind me, I heard the door to the kitchen opening. The waitress called out, “Hey!”

  I didn’t look back, just ran out of Happy’s Place and kept going.

  20

  No sign of Sheldon Gunn or Kolnikov outside. What did they know about us, the Outlaws? I’d been about to find out when things took a horrible turn; maybe more accurate to say when already horrible things took a horrible turn. But one thing I knew for sure: there was nothing accidental about the death of Mr. Wilders. Did I have any facts? Maybe not actual provable facts. What I had was maybe even more than that, although vaguer at the same time: And now I come to troublesome professor, handled in the Moscow way. I didn’t have a doubt in my mind. What I had was fear. Were they planning to handle us in the Moscow way too?

  I got lost in all these dark thoughts, and the next thing I knew, I was back home in our building, trudging up the stairs to our apartment. I unlocked the door and went inside. Mom was at the laptop in the kitchen, typing real fast.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said, and suddenly was right on the point of letting tons of stuff come spilling out.

  “Hi, Robbie,” she said, not looking up. “Still raining outside?”

  All she had to do was glance out the window. But actually I didn’t know either—that was how out of it I’d been—so I had to glance out the window myself.

  “More like snow now,” I told her.

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  Tap tap, tap tap—her fingers were practically a blur. Maybe it was bad of me, but I wanted them to stop.

  “What are you writing?” I said.

  Her fingers, nails bitten right down—when had that happened?—went still, hovering over the keyboard. My mom looked up. “A sort of proposal,” she said. “I’m applying for an in-house job.”

  I’d heard of in-house jobs: a way for lawyers to still make good money without having to be the fastest rat in the race.

  “What does it pay?” I said, the question just blurting itself out.

  My mom’s eyebrows rose. “Cutting to the chase,
huh?” she said.

  “Sorry,” I said. “But will we be able to buy the building? Mitch is thinking of selling.”

  “Probably not enough,” my mom said. “And how did you know? Did you see the real estate agent on your way up?”

  “Real estate agent?”

  “I think they’ve got a potential buyer downstairs at this very moment.”

  “Already?”

  She rested her hands on the table. “But it’s nothing for us to worry about,” my mom said. “Tenants have lots of rights in this city, and if at some point we have to move, there’d be plenty of time to find a place we liked.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Mom.”

  Her fingers hooked themselves in a purposeful way and returned to the keyboard. I went upstairs with no plan, and stood in my room kind of paralyzed, staring out the window. This wasn’t the kind of paralysis where you didn’t know what to do. This was the kind where you knew but couldn’t face doing it. I had to tell Ashanti what I’d seen and heard. And it had to be in person. In person was the hardest of all the possible communication methods, but I just sort of knew that if you were communicating something hard, then the method had to be hard, too.

  At least, as I gazed out my window, I knew it for a little while. Then I began to backtrack, thinking, for example, what if things were reversed and I was in Ashanti’s place? Wouldn’t I want to know? At first, I was sure I would, but then I started asking myself why. Knowing would be a terrible burden, the unbundling of which would lead to awful scenes and almost certainly the breakup of the family. So maybe some things were better not to know. But I already knew! Why did that have to happen? Didn’t we have enough going on? I started feeling a little sorry for myself. Feeling sorry for yourself can actually feel kind of good, in a way, sort of like a low-grade fever, just enough to stay home from school and lie in bed, the mind having weirder than usual thoughts but not too weird.