The Outlaws of Sherwood Street: Giving to the Poor

by Peter Abrahams

“The keys!” I said.

  “What are you talking about?” Dina said.

  Ashanti was already sliding down the sloping floor to the taxi, like a surfer. She grabbed on to the driver’s side door, peered inside.

  “Yes!”

  “Who’s going to drive?” I said.

  Before anyone could answer, Silas groaned and began to stir. His eyelids rose, fluttered closed, rose again. He looked at us, his eyes slowly coming into focus.

  “Uh, what’s going on?” he said. “Like, what’s happenin’, dudes?”

  “You know perfectly well what’s happening,” Ashanti said.

  “I do?” Silas started to sit up. “Oooh—my jaw hurts.” He felt it gingerly. “Anybody got aspirin?”

  I leaned in closer, gave him a real close look. Was he even sane? “You really don’t know where you are?”

  He glanced around. “We’re in a cab. Who’s paying? And where’s the driver?”

  “But you know more than we do!” Ashanti said. “You’ve been communicating nonstop.”

  “You’re not making much sense, Ashanti. But no change there, huh? Just kidding,” he added, seeing the look on her face. That was when he noticed Dina, standing behind Ashanti. “What’s she doing here? Where are we?”

  Why didn’t he know? Was the charmed, unconscious part of him—the part that had figured out so much already—completely separate from the rest of Silas? Or—maybe he’d been wrong about things, and we weren’t getting buried alive, instead were—

  “No time to explain,” Dina said, her expression changing, turning more take-charge at last. “I’ll handle the driving,” she added, “unless anyone else is licensed.”

  • • •

  Dina got behind the wheel of the taxi. Silas sat in front since he was already there, rooting around in the glove box for aspirin. Ashanti and I sat in back, right next to each other.

  From above: thump, thump, thump, growing softer and softer. Dina switched on the engine, and also the headlights. It got bright in the trailer. Ashanti stuck her head out the window, peered up. “The roof’s sagging.”

  “Buckle up,” Dina said.

  We buckled up.

  Dina craned around so she could see through the rear window. “Get ready—I’m going to floor it. In reverse.”

  Dina floored it. She floored it so hard I would have shot right into the front seat if it hadn’t been for the seat belt. We shot straight backward—and up, on account of how the trailer was sloping—the tires shrieking, and the rear bumper of the taxi slammed into the locked double doors. They crumpled like tin foil, and we barreled out, seemed to be airborne for a second or two, and then came to a sudden and immediate stop, so violent I wanted to puke.

  “Out, out, everybody out,” Ashanti shouted, flinging open her door. I scrambled across the seat after her and jumped out, immediately sliding down a muddy slope and coming to rest near the back of the trailer.

  • • •

  It was a very strange world down where I was. For a few moments I could hardly make any sense of it at all. I lay in some sort of deep pit, lit strongly in some places and dimly in others by the taxi headlights. The rear of the taxi was embedded in the side of the pit and the front wheels weren’t even on any sort of ground, but free in the air, the whole taxi now pointing upward. Tread marks led steeply up from the bottom of the pit, where the trailer stood, all the way up to the top. And there at the top, at the edge of the headlights’ reach, two men were peering down. One, holding an umbrella, was Sheldon Gunn. The other, a gun in his hand, was Harry Henkel. Gunn motioned with his hand, and a bulldozer came into view, Kolnikov at the controls. He lowered the blade and dumped a load of dirt down into the pit, some of it landing on the roof of the trailer and some landing on us.

  Dina turned to me, a clump of mud in her hair. “We’re at the bottom of the construction site?”

  “Yes. They’re going to bury us way under Gunn Tower where no one will ever know.”

  “And not only that,” Silas said, pointing out a wire that ran down the pit from the top and disappeared into a squarish hole in the dirt wall just beyond the trailer, about the size of my bedroom window, “they’ve found the Canarsee site, and they’re going to blow it up.”

  “The Canarsee site?” Dina said.

  “A sacred spring and burial place,” Ashanti said.

  “That Professor Wilders found,” I added.

  “Which was why”—Silas paused, took a deep breath—“they killed him.”

  Dina whipped out her phone, glanced at it and put it away. “No service.”

  “Jammed,” I said. A shadow fell over us. I looked up. Another load of dirt was falling from above. “Quick,” I said. We all rolled under the trailer. Thud, thud, thud, followed by a moment of quiet. Then I felt the charm heating up some more on my chest. Had it finally decided we were desperate enough? Was that how the charm thought? Were all charms this difficult? I took it off my neck. “If not now, when?” I said to it.

  “Huh? said Dina. “What’s that?”

  “Uh, nothing,” I said, now sounding my very dumbest. I pointed the charm—it actually pointed itself—at the wire.

  25

  Things happened fast after that. First came a sizzle and the wire burst into flame. Second, the flame, white hot, started racing up along the wire, growing bigger and bigger. It reached the top of the pit in a second or two and blew up in a strange silent burst that was too bright to look at. Then came cries of fear, followed by a deep rumbling. The whole pit began to cave in from the top down, sucking in Gunn, Henkel, and the bulldozer, with Kolnikov still in it. Terror spread across all their faces, making them look very similar, like brothers.

  “Into the hole,” I yelled, putting the charm back around my neck. “It’s our only chance.”

  We all dove into the squarish hole. The walls of the pit came thundering down, and everything went dark. We were sealed in, down under the surface of the earth. I came real close to screaming in panic.

  I took a deep breath, struggled for control of my own self, suddenly found something useful to say. “Silas? Got your flashlight?”

  “What kind of question is that?” He switched it on. I’d lost my glasses, but it didn’t matter: I was in charmed vision mode now, everything hyperclear. I looked farther into the hole. We were in the Canarsee tunnel, the wire stretching on, out of sight: the remains of the wire, since the whole upper part was now gone. And in the other direction, outside the squarish window-sized hole, there was a small space, partly clear, saved from the cave-in by the trailer’s bulk. Movement was going on in that cleared space, some sort of struggle involving three trapped men.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “Where?” said Silas.

  I pushed him ahead into the tunnel, pushed them all.

  “Run!”

  Ducking low, they all began to run, following Silas deeper into the tunnel. I glanced back through the squarish hole, saw Gunn claw himself out from a pile of dirt, then Kolnikov, and finally Henkel—all of them mud men now, like some alien species.

  “Kill them!” Gunn shouted.

  “But what about us?” Henkel said.

  “We’ll be rescued,” Gunn told him. “And I’ll do the thinking. Kill them all!”

  Kolnikov switched on one of those cell phone flashlights. Henkel took out his gun and started climbing into the squarish hole. I ran.

  A gunshot rang out almost at once, very loud in the enclosed space. I ran as fast as I could, given I had to keep my head down in the tunnel—and my heart was running faster. Water was running, too: I could hear it flowing along beside me just beyond the right-hand tunnel wall, the old Canarsee spring that had been diverted long ago.

  I caught up to the others, not too difficult since they weren’t going very fast, not with Silas in the lead. Henkel’s gun roared again, and a big lump of
dirt fell from the tunnel wall, exposing a section of the huge old rusted pipe we’d seen before.

  I heard Kolnikov behind us. “Give me this stupid gun,” he said. “You shoot like blind man.”

  Which was the very moment Silas slipped on something and fell. We all slammed into him and went down in a heap just as Kolnikov fired. This shot probably would have hit us, but because we were on the ground, it missed, hitting the lower part of the pipe. A trickle of water dribbled out. I saw we’d fallen right beside the bones of the little family from long ago.

  Before we could rise, Gunn, Kolnikov and Henkel came running up, stopping at the other end of the exposed pipe, water trickling out between us and them.

  Gunn stared down at us, his eyes angry and wild. “Now,” he said. “Do it.”

  Kolnikov raised the gun, pointed it at me first.

  “Charm!” I cried out. “Please!”

  Whether because of the charm or just the bullet hole, that was the moment the pipe erupted. An enormous tide of water gushed out with a pent-up sort of roar, missing the four of us by inches. But the flood didn’t miss our enemies. It swept up Gunn, Kolnikov, and Henkel like they were nothing and carried them away. A hand grasped frantically above the wave tops before a whole big section of the roof fell in, turning everything to mud and entombing the three of them in an instant, deep and gone.

  Water kept flowing out of the pipe, not as explosively as before but in growing volume. We jumped up, ran farther down the tunnel, the only direction possible. The water followed. At first we were splashing, then wading, and finally swimming, rising closer and closer to the ceiling in a shrinking blanket of air.

  “I can’t swim and hold the flashlight!” Silas shouted. The light flickered.

  “Give it to me,” Ashanti called.

  “I can’t swim anyway! I told you before!”

  I rolled onto my back, the water so cold, and took off the charm. “Help,” I said. But the charm had grown icy cold. What? We weren’t desperate enough? “What’s wrong with you?” Maybe I shouldn’t have said that. The next moment, the charm broke into countless pieces, all of them fluttering out of my hand into the stream, and vanishing from sight. There was nothing I could do. We were on our own.

  Silas’s light flickered again. The thought we’re done stirred in my mind, but before it could take over, a big fat length of pipe just ahead broke loose and bobbed away. Suddenly a hole appeared in the wall behind where that pipe section had been and we all got sucked into it.

  Into the hole, and right away we got slammed into a narrow vertical shaft. Then the water came surging in and we rose and rose on a powerful sort of fountain top, like we were on an out-of-control elevator shooting up, up, up. High above, I glimpsed stars in the night sky, but just a small circle of them, crisscrossed by dark bars. A circle with dark bars? I squinted at it, but my normal lousy vision was back—thanks, charm—and I couldn’t tell what I was seeing. The next second, the water, so much of it squeezed into the narrow shaft, enveloped me completely. I was going to drown! I closed my eyes, closed my mouth, held my breath. And all the time, I kept zooming upward at carnival-ride speed.

  Then with a powerful whooshing sound, like a giant fire hose had been turned on, I was tossed out of the shaft and into the night. I tumbled in a somersault, gulping in air, and right beside me, also sort of tumbling, was a drain grate, round and crisscrossed with steel bars. I landed hard on wet ground, and the breath I’d just taken in got knocked right back out of me.

  I sat up, panting, tried to get my bearings. Around me, Ashanti, Silas, and Dina, all of them soaked and bedraggled, were doing the same thing. We seemed to be in a bare sort of yard behind a plain concrete building that seemed familiar. On the other three sides stood a fence topped with razor wire. I gazed up at the windows on the back wall of the building.

  The Annex? The offshoot or whatever it was of the Family Detention Center? Suddenly it made sense: wasn’t the Annex very close to the Gunn Tower site? But on account of my blurry vision, I couldn’t be sure. I squinted up at the window where I’d seen Tut-Tut.

  “Tut-Tut! Tut-Tut!”

  And almost like he’d been waiting for his cue, Tut-Tut popped up in the window.

  “Tut-Tut!”

  He waved through the window. Meanwhile water was rushing up from below, not just through the shaft but through the ground itself. Alarms and sirens started going off all over the place. The whole yard got flooded in seconds, dark water rising up and lifting us off the ground. In moments were already almost at second-floor level.

  “Tut-Tut!” I called. “Jump!”

  He started struggling with the window.

  “Jump, jump!” Ashanti and Silas shouted.

  “You know him?” said Dina, dog-paddling beside me, her hair no longer fluffy but clinging wetly to her head.

  “No time to explain.”

  We treaded water. Somehow Silas’s flashlight was still working. He shone it on Tut-Tut. Tut-Tut’s face twisted with effort, and just when I thought he was never getting out, the window flew open. Tut-Tut climbed onto the sill, and did a beautiful swan dive into the water. Ashanti, Silas, and I swam over to Tut-Tut—Silas actually floundering more than swimming—and we surrounded him, pounding him on the back. Tut-Tut started to smile, but before that smile had finished spreading across his face, the earth roared and a whole ocean seemed to pour out of it. In an instant, we were caught in a sort of tsunami. It ripped that razor-wire fence right out of the ground and carried it away like nothing. We got swept out through the alley and onto the street. For a whole block, we were prisoners of this awesome tide, but then it began to lose its strength and finally deposited us—like shipwreck survivors on a beach—in front of a bar with a blinking neon light. A drunk peered out the window, gazed at us and the whole flood scene, shook his head, and retreated.

  We got to our feet, soaked and shivering with cold.

  “My God,” Dina said. “I don’t even know where to begin.”

  “Great,” said Silas. “Then we’ll be saying good night.”

  “Whoa,” Dina said. “This is the story of my life.” She turned to me. “How about we start with that thing you pointed at the detonation wire?”

  Uh-oh. I tried to imagine the story Dina was going to put together, saw nothing good. “Let’s make a deal,” I said.

  “What kind of deal?”

  “The kind of deal where we answer your questions but you keep us out of the story.”

  “Huh?” said Dina. “How can I do that?”

  “By making yourself the hero,” Ashanti said.

  Dina got a shrewd look in her eyes. “Let’s hear it.”

  So we told her about the charm, where it had come from and what it had done.

  “Who’s going to believe that?” she said.

  “Exactly,” said Ashanti.

  “Have we got a deal?” I said.

  Dina nodded. We shook hands on it. She went one way. We went another.

  • • •

  First stop: Sherwood Street HQ, where we got the space heater going and dried ourselves out. Tut-Tut had a grin that wouldn’t go away. Silas gave him the fake green card, and they high-fived each other, like all Tut-Tut’s problems were solved. I was already making other plans.

  We left Tut-Tut at HQ. Ashanti, Silas, and I went to the subway station, where she and I boarded our train, and Silas got on his. Not long after that, Ashanti and I were on our street, walking home on a nice normal sort of night, the sky clear, the air growing milder. I put my hand on her shoulder.

  “I’ve got something to tell you,” I said.

  “Like what?”

  I took a deep breath and told her the whole truth about what I’d seen and heard at Happy’s Place. I felt better. She felt worse. Then I, too, felt worse.

  • • •

  “I’m home.”

 
; My mom called down from upstairs. “It’s late. Were you at Ashanti’s the whole time?”

  “Yeah.” In a manner of speaking, sort of stretching the point, most likely across the honesty/dishonesty line.

  “I know it’s still vacation, but you should have touched base.”

  “Sorry.”

  I threw all my mud encrusted clothes into the washer and took a shower. Just as I was getting into my pajamas, my mom knocked on the door.

  “Did you hear about all the flooding downtown?” she said.

  “Flooding?”

  “A burst water main or something at the Gunn Tower site. The pictures are amazing.”

  “I’ll, uh, check it out later.”

  I went into the bathroom and found my old glasses, the frames so lame and hideously out of date, with a prescription that was no longer strong enough but better than nothing. Just as a sort of test, I looked out the window. Up the street, a taxi was idling outside Ashanti’s place. Her father came out, carrying a suitcase, and got in the taxi. It drove off.

  Meanwhile my phone was ringing: Silas.

  “Thaddeus thought it was for a TV show,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “Henkel paid him fifty bucks.”

  “I’m not following this, Silas.”

  “Meaning Thaddeus didn’t know we were being set up. Henkel told him it was for this new reality show called Scavenger Hunt and Dina was one of the items.”

  “Thaddeus fell for that?”

  “He’s headed back to rehab first thing tomorrow.”

  • • •

  The next morning Dina was on the front page of all the papers in town, and also on the Today Show. She told an exciting story about getting kidnapped because of her investigation into the death of Mr. Wilders, huge nighttime explosions at the Gunn Tower site, and the disappearance under a mountain of rubble of Sheldon Gunn and an unknown number of his associates. We kids weren’t mentioned, not one word. A multi-acre lake—people were already calling it Lake Canarsee—was now forming at the Gunn Tower site. An architect showed preliminary plans for a boathouse and waterfront cafés.