Robbie Forester and the Outlaws of Sherwood Street

by Peter Abrahams

  We had an intrasquad scrimmage at practice after school the next day, Ms. Kleinberg reffing. She divided us up by uniform numbers, odds against evens, meaning Ashanti, number six, was on one team and I, number thirty-one, was on the other. I’d passed her earlier in the halls, and she hadn’t looked at me. And now, during the scrimmage, she wasn’t looking at me either, just waltzing by a couple of times for easy layups.

  “Position, Robbie,” Ms. Kleinberg called. “Get those feet in position.”

  Ashanti took a pass, dribbled down on me again. I concentrated on my feet, trying to get them square to Ashanti’s path, but Ashanti’s path changed at the very last split second and she blew by me one more time. Easy layup. And again without seeming to see me, or even be aware of my existence. That was the most infuriating part.

  “Arms, Robbie—get those arms up!”

  Plus I was getting real tired of Ms. Kleinberg yelling at me from courtside. Why couldn’t she yell at someone else? Were they all playing like LeBron James? While I was having those thoughts, the ball bounced my way and I grabbed it and headed down the court. For once I hadn’t even the slightest wish to pass, only wanted to spring up and jam the ball through the hoop (an absurd fantasy, of course, since I couldn’t get within two feet of the rim jumping my highest). And smash the glass to smithereens, too, while I was at it, as I’d seen on TV once or twice—also part of my fantasy, maybe the best part.

  But in the end, I didn’t even get close to the basket, never mind actually putting points on the board. I’d barely reached the top of the key when Ashanti swept in from the side and stole the ball, just plucking it clean out of the air in mid-dribble.

  Ashanti circled around and started dribbling the other way, easily faking out a player or two. I took off after her, so mad I wasn’t thinking at all. Ashanti was a way better athlete than me—I was under no illusions about that—but I’m a pretty fast runner, an ability I’ve never worked on, just had from when I was little. And of course Ashanti was dribbling the ball, and that slows anyone down.

  I got closer and closer, till the squeaking of Ashanti’s sneakers on the hardwood seemed to grow very loud, and finally caught up to her just as she was taking that last little stutter step and gathering the ball—with her right hand at the bottom and her left hand on the side, the way Ms. Kleinberg had taught us—before going up for the shot. I reached in for the ball, trying to knock it away from her just as she’d knocked it away from me, but I missed completely, hitting her in the side instead. Then somehow our legs got tangled up. We both went flying—the gym spun in a complete three sixty in front of my eyes—and crashed down on the floor, real hard.

  We lay there side by side, making those noises people make when they’re hurt. But not badly hurt; at least I wasn’t. The other kids came running up. Ashanti turned to me—our heads were only a couple of feet apart—and glared.

  “You’re a pain in the ass, you know that?” she said.

  “Right back at ya,” I said. Pretty lame, I know, but nothing better occurred to me.

  Ashanti rose with a grunt of pain. Then, not actually looking at me, she held out her hand. I took it. She helped me up, just the way the jocks do it on TV.

  Ms. Kleinberg blew her whistle. “Ashanti shooting two,” she said.

  We took our places around the key, Ashanti at the line.

  Ms. Kleinberg glanced at me. “Nice aggressive play, Robbie,” she said. “Sometimes a foul’s the right move.”

  She handed Ashanti the ball. Ashanti hit two. I took the ball, inbounded it to our other guard, and headed down the floor. Ashanti elbowed me as I went by, but not hard, in fact sort of friendly-like, if elbowing could ever be friendly. I suddenly got hot—if that’s what it was: my first-ever time being hot, so I couldn’t be sure—and hit three quick baskets before the final whistle. No electric ball, no red-gold beam for aiming. Just me, firing it up there.

  Ashanti was waiting for me on the street when I left school. She gave me one of those cool gazes of hers, looking down, on account of her height advantage. “There’s stuff about you I don’t like,” she said.

  “I picked up on that,” I said.

  Then came a surprise. Ashanti shook her head and started laughing. “See?” she said. “And then you do something like that.”

  “Like what?” I said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Whether we like each other or not, I mean. The point is we’re in this together.”

  “In what?” I said.

  Ashanti didn’t answer, waited for some kids coming out of Thatcher’s front door to go by. Then she came a little closer, lowered her voice. “Stopping the New Brooklyn Redevelopment Project, for God’s sake! What else?”

  “Stopping the project? What are you talking about?”

  “Do you think it’s just Mr. Nok and that soup kitchen? Sheldon Gunn is driving people out of their places all over town.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because of this blog I found.”

  “What blog?”

  Just as Ashanti started to answer, Ms. Kleinberg came through the door. She saw us, paused for a moment, then came down the steps, quick and light on her feet. “Way to leave it on the court, girls,” she said as she went by. “Nice practice.” She crossed the street and went around the corner, moving at twice the speed of all the other pedestrians.

  “Leave what on the court?” I said.

  “No clue,” said Ashanti.

  “Maybe that was some sort of guidance,” I said.

  “Possibly.”

  “But getting back to the blog.”

  Ashanti took out her phone, pressed some buttons. “Sheldon Gunn Is a Monster dot-com,” she said. We gazed at the screen, waiting for the page to pop up. “Hey!” she said. “What the…?”

  I leaned closer, read the message: The page you are looking for can no longer be found.

  “Are you sure you entered it right?” I said.

  She gave me a quick glare. “Yeah, I’m sure.” But she tried again. Same message.

  “Can you remember what was on it?” I said.

  “Not the specifics,” Ashanti said. “There was all this stuff about people getting kicked out of their apartments, little businesses that can’t make the new rent, that kind of thing, but I don’t remember the… wait a minute—is there something called the Red Goat?”

  “It’s a bar.”

  “Where?”

  “Near the canal. My dad and some of his writer pals used to go there, but then advertising guys started showing up. They didn’t get along.”

  “Why not?”

  I didn’t know. Meanwhile, we’d started walking, but not toward the brownstones down the street where I could see those two nannies sitting on a stoop and push-pulling their strollers. Instead, with no discussion, we were headed the other way, toward the canal.

  We have this canal in Brooklyn. Long ago the Dutch fished and went clamming in its clear waters—I learned that at Joe Louis. No fish or clams now, of course: the water’s that same sickly green you see in the test tubes of mad scientists in the movies. As Ashanti and I crossed the bridge, a big fat gas bubble burst on the surface, and then another, rising up from the putrid depths. We caught the familiar stink, way worse in summer than now.

  “Eww,” said Ashanti.

  The Red Goat stood across the street from the bridge, one of those lopsided old buildings you see in Brooklyn sometimes, leaning like a drunk, which was kind of appropriate. A big carved red goat hung over the door.

  “Cool sign,” Ashanti said.

  “Yeah, and the building leans like—” I began to say, letting Ashanti on my little joke, but stopped when the door opened and a man came out with a stepladder. He wore heavy work boots, shorts, and a T-shirt—one of those guys who dressed like it was summer all year round. He had a shiny bald head and a full beard, a look you saw from time to time, and which I found vaguely nauseating. In a moment or two, he’d set up the ladder and was at the top, working
on the Red Goat sign with a screwdriver. He took out some screws, stuck them in his teeth, grabbed the goat by its front legs, and pulled. The goat came free. The guy put it on his shoulder and climbed down the ladder.

  We crossed the street. “Hi,” I said. “Cool goat.”

  The guy grunted and started toward the door.

  “Cool goat” maybe hadn’t been the way to go, and time was running out, since we couldn’t follow him inside.

  “Um,” I said.

  And then Ashanti saved the day. “We’re doing a school project,” she said. “All about the New Brooklyn Redevelopment Project.”

  The guy stopped and turned. “Got nothin’ to say about those”—and then came a word that kids are not supposed to utter, although adults do all the time.

  “How come?” said Ashanti.

  “How come? Because they’re the”—another one of those words—“that’s puttin’ me out of”—and one more—“business. Why do you think I’m taking down Big Nanny?”

  “That’s the goat’s name?” I said.

  “Since 1959,” said the guy.

  “It’s a great name,” I said.

  “Well, forget about it,” said the guy. “Over, kaput, finito.”

  “Because of the New Brooklyn Redevelopment Project?” Ashanti said. It hit me that maybe she outdid me a bit when it came to sticking to the point.

  “Better believe it,” the guy said, plus some more bad language.

  “What happened?” Ashanti said.

  “Huh?” said the guy. “What’s it to you?”

  “Like we said,” Ashanti told him. “A school project.”

  He shifted Big Nanny on his shoulder in an impatient sort of way. A neck chain that had been hidden under his T-shirt popped out, with silver letters hanging on the end: Duke. “How’s talkin’ to a couple of school kids gonna help me?”

  “Well,” Ashanti said, “there’s getting your story out there.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Like, fighting the PR war.”

  “PR war?” said Duke. “Are you nuts? Those jerks own the PR companies.”

  “They do?” I said.

  “They own everything. That’s the point.”

  “They don’t own you,” I said.

  “Only ’cause I’m not worth anything no more,” Duke said. “This is late-stage capitalism—don’t they teach you nothin’ in school no more?”

  That shut me up. I’d never heard of late-stage capitalism, and what if they really weren’t teaching us anything in school? But it didn’t shut Ashanti up.

  “They don’t own us,” she said.

  Duke squinted at her. “I was like you once,” he said. “Just wait.” He went inside the Red Goat and slammed the door.

  Ashanti and I looked at each other. “Have you gotten to late-stage capitalism?” I said.

  “Nope.”

  “Maybe it comes in high school.”

  “Can’t wait.” We moved away from the Red Goat. “We’re nowhere,” Ashanti said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We need info.”

  “Right. What was the name of that blog?”

  “Sheldon Gunn Is a Monster dot-com. Where did the stupid thing go?”

  “You mean where do blogs go when they’re gone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No clue,” I said. “Do you know any geeks?”

  “Practically everyone I know is a geek,” said Ashanti. “Present company excluded, of course.”

  “Hey. I’m just tremendously honored.”

  “You’re more of the sarcastic type.”

  “And you?” I said.

  Ashanti’s eyes shifted. For a moment she looked very still and quiet, her aggression or chippiness or whatever you wanted to call it disappearing. “Maybe the same,” she said. At that moment, I actually did feel honored, if just the tiniest bit.

  “The kind of geek we’re looking for,” I said, “is the techno-expert-type.”

  Her face brightened. She snapped her fingers. Ashanti turned out to be one of those people capable of loud finger snaps. “Silas,” she said.

  “Who’s he?”

  “This kid I sort of know. Couldn’t be geekier.”

  “He’s at Thatcher?”

  Ashanti shook her head. “He doesn’t go to school.”

  “Meaning he’s already graduated from college?”

  “Who said anything about college? Silas is my age. He’s a homeschooler.”

  When it comes to homeschooling, I think of rural places, like farms and ranches, or at least the burbs, but Silas lived in an apartment building just tall enough to be called a high-rise, about a ten-minute walk from the Red Goat. DOORMAN OFF DUTY read a notice, which suited me fine: I can open my own doors, don’t need some guy dressed like an extra from The Nutcracker to do it for me. In the outer lobby, Ashanti looked up the apartment number and pressed the buzzer.

  A few seconds passed and then a voice came through the speaker: “Stand and deliver.”

  Yes, a geek for sure.

  “Silas?” Ashanti said.

  Through the speaker: “The one, the only.”

  “It’s Ashanti. Let me in.”

  Silas’s voice rose a few notes. “Ashanti?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “You want to come up?”

  “Right again.”

  “It’s just me here.”

  “Hitting the books?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Ashanti rolled her eyes. “Silas?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Press. The. Buzzer.”

  Bzzz. We went into the inner lobby and rode the elevator to the sixth floor. Silas’s apartment was at the end of the hall. He was standing by the open door in one of those toes-out postures, a roundish, red-haired kid with freckles, about Ashanti’s height. Silas was dressed like a Thatcher boy—khakis and a collared shirt—except for one detail: he also wore a bow tie. He had one of those very expressive faces, like an actor. Right now it was expressing awkward surprise.

  “This is Robbie,” Ashanti said as we drew closer. “Robbie, Silas. Silas, Robbie.”

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Um,” said Silas.

  By that time we were at the door. Silas rocked back and forth.

  “Haven’t seen you in a while,” Ashanti said.

  “Day before Thanksgiving,” Silas said. “Schermerhorn subway station. You said you hated turkey.”

  “Right,” said Ashanti. “There’s that photographic memory.”

  “Well,” said Silas, “it’s not exactly photographic, if by photographic you mean—”

  “We don’t really have a lot of time,” Ashanti said, “since we’re on our way home from school and all, so if you’ll just invite us in, we can get started.”

  “Get started on what?” Silas said.

  “Sheldon Gunn Is a Monster dot-com is—” Ashanti said.

  “I agree,” said Silas.

  “About what?” Ashanti said.

  “Sheldon Gunn.”

  “You know who he is?” I said.

  “He bought the building where my mother works, and raised the rents,” Silas said. “Her boss says he’ll have to close the business.”

  “Maybe not,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” said Silas.

  I explained about the missing blog. Soon we were in Silas’s bedroom, a small, tidy bedroom in a small apartment that was messy everyplace else. Silas sat in front of his computer, tapping away. I sat on a stool. Ashanti lounged on the bed.

  “Who’s that on the wall?” Ashanti said.

  “Turing,” Silas said, not taking his eyes off the screen.

  “Who’s he?” I said. The Turing guy had heavy dark eyebrows and wore a tweed suit.

  Silas turned in surprise. “Turing? You don’t know Turing? We wouldn’t be doing this without Turing.”

  “Doing what?” I said.

  “Anything on computers.”

  “He invented computers?” I said
.

  “I thought that was Bill Gates,” said Ashanti.

  Silas looked at her, then at me. “Where do you guys go to school, again?”

  “Thatcher,” we said.

  “You have to pay?”

  We nodded.

  He shook his head, then went back to work.

  “How’s homeschooling?” I asked after a minute or

  two.

  “Not bad,” said Silas, one finger up in the air, hesitating, then coming down decisively on a key. “Calculus is pretty cool.”

  “You’re learning calculus?” I said.

  “I needed it for this app I’m working on,” said Silas.

  “What does it do?” I asked.

  “Well,” he said, his voice suddenly deepening into a manly register, then squeaking back up to where it had been, “there are some bugs to iron out, but it’s for opening combination locks.”

  “How?” I said.

  Silas turned to me, rubbing his hands, his face pinkening with excitement. “You load the app onto your phone, then point the phone at the lock.”

  “That’s it?”

  “The combination pops up on your screen.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “It’s a few weeks away,” Silas said, “but I can show you some of the code, if you like.”

  “Maybe some other time,” Ashanti said, getting off the bed. “Right now we need you working on the blog thing.”

  “That?” said Silas. “It’s all done.” He hit a key. The printer on his desk came to life. “Name, social security number, address, e-mail, phone, and credit report.”

  “What are you talking about?” Ashanti said.

  “The blogger who runs Sheldon Gunn Is a Monster dot-com,” said Silas. “Isn’t that what you wanted?” A sheet of paper slid into the tray. Silas took it out and handed it to me.

  And that was when we got a shock, the surprise kind of shock and the literal kind. In the exchange, while Silas and I were both still touching the paper, the electric ball hit me, the hardest hit yet, but also the quickest to go. At the same instant, Silas cried out in pain, and a split second later, the sheet of paper burst into flames. We both snatched our hands away; the burning page glided down to the floor, was mostly ashes by the time it landed. Ashanti stamped out the remaining embers.