Robbie Forester and the Outlaws of Sherwood Street

by Peter Abrahams

“I saw what I saw,” I said, keeping my head up.

  There was a pause. Then Ashanti said, “I believe you.”

  Silas bit his lip, gazed at the ceiling, scratched the side of his nose, and then nodded.

  Tut-Tut took the briefcase and felt around inside, like he believed me so much that the money had to be there, despite what we’d seen with our own eyes. Suddenly his hand went still. The rest of us leaned closer. He’d found a very narrow zipper in the briefcase lining. Now he pulled it open, revealing a tiny compartment. And in the compartment: a folded-up sheet of paper. Tut-Tut unfolded it and laid it on the desk.

  It was a handwritten list of surnames, fifteen or twenty, the top one being Schleck. I scanned the names, recognized none.

  “What’s this all about?” Ashanti said.

  Silas reached into his jacket, pulled out a big sheaf of papers, tire tracks visible on the top one, meaning these had to be the papers that had gotten away from him out on the street. He started riffling through them, glancing once or twice at the list from the briefcase. I could feel Ashanti’s growing impatience, foresaw Silas losing his grip on the papers once more, and held up my finger to keep her quiet. Somewhat to my surprise, she remained silent.

  “Any thumbtacks?” Silas said.

  Tut-Tut found a box of thumbtacks. Silas went to one of the blank walls and began tacking up some of his papers, which turned out to be map printouts. He arranged them, rearranged them, and eventually we were looking at a map of the entire borough.

  “Voilà,” he said, stepping back. “Brooklyn.” He stood there as though waiting for applause. When none came, he went on, “See where I’ve made little red circles? Each one is an address from the Monster blog, which no longer exists except at the end of one tiny trail I happened to track down in deepest cyberspace.” The reality of this was Silas alone at the computer in his bedroom until all hours, but at that moment I understood it was like a real expedition in the wild to him, and I caught some of his excitement.

  “Now,” he said, picking up more papers from the desk and passing them around, “here’s a whole bunch of names that Heinz Mott had in a separate file. I’ve started matching them up to the addresses. For example, Your Thai is right here”—he jabbed at the map—“and here’s the place that burned down the other night, and the name of the people who go with it, which happens to be”—he checked a sheet that Tut-Tut was examining—“Tim and Maria Schleck.”

  “Schleck?” I said.

  “Correck,” said Silas.

  Silas had a way of making your eyes roll, which mine and Ashanti’s were doing, but Tut-Tut was laughing one of his delighted laughs.

  “But Schleck is the first name on the list,” I said.

  We all checked the list Tut-Tut had found in the briefcase: Schleck.

  “So, therefore?” Ashanti said.

  “All we know is that the Schleck address went up in flames,” I said. I thought of the man and woman in tears—Tim and Maria?—both in long coats and barefoot, tears streaming down their faces. “What’s the next name on the list?” I asked.

  “Rewind Enterprises,” Ashanti replied.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “No clue,” she told me.

  “But,” said Silas, turning to the map, “it’s right here.” He pointed to a little red circle.

  “Hey,” said Ashanti. “That’s just two blocks away.” Everybody jumped up.

  REWIND, read the sign. SATISFYING ALL YOUR VINYL NEEDS SINCE 1963.

  We stood outside this tiny hole-in-the-wall store with no display windows and a glass door so dusty you couldn’t see inside.

  “What’s vinyl?” I said, pretty sure this was not the kind of place we should be entering.

  “Short for vinyl chloride,” Silas said.

  “Much obliged,” I said.

  Silas did his turning-red thing and added, “A kind of plastic. They used to make records out of it.”

  “My grandfather has a whole collection,” said Ashanti.

  Then came a big surprise. Tut-Tut opened his mouth and sang, “Home, home on the range, where the deer and the antelope play; Where seldom is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day.”

  Tut-Tut could sing? Sing without the slightest hint of stuttering? And hit every note, besides?

  “You can sing?” I said. “You’ve been able to sing all this time?”

  “Y-y-y-ye-ye-,” he said.

  Silas snapped his fingers—a snap, since he was wearing gloves, that made no sound. “Wait a minute,” he said. “All you’ve got to do is sing whatever it is you want to say.”

  Tut-Tut shook his head.

  “Like if you want to say, ‘Another chocolate chip cookie for me,’ all you’d have to do is sing it.”

  Tut-Tut kept shaking his head, but Silas didn’t seem to notice.

  “Like this,” he said, and sang, “Another chocolate chip cookie for me,” in a grating voice, hitting none of the notes. “Or, suppose you wanted to explain vinyl. Vinyl, vinyl,” he sang, even more horribly than before, “I have no idea what rhymes with vi—”

  The door to Rewind flew open and an angry man glared out. “What’s going on?”

  “Um,” we said, “uh.”

  “Beat it or I’ll call the cops,” he said.

  He was bald on top, but had extremely long fringe hair, mostly gray, the back part tied in a ponytail that reached practically to his waist, the side parts just sort of hanging there, untamed and frizzy. My dad said there were maybe three hippies left in Brooklyn. This had to be one of them.

  He looked us over. “Bunch of outlaws,” he said.

  “Outlaws?” I said. How could anyone know? We’d just finished picking the name.

  “Stealin’ music off the net,” the hippie said. “What else do you call it?”

  I’d never done that, not once. Paying for content was one of my dad’s strictest rules. “We’re not outlaws,” I said.

  “Not in that sense,” added Silas.

  Ashanti gave him a hard poke in the ribs.

  “Huh?” said the hippie.

  “Ooof,” said Silas. And, “Ow.”

  This wasn’t going well, and the hippie’s eyes were getting narrower and narrower.

  “We don’t want to steal anything,” I said.

  “Meaning you want to buy?”

  “Well, look around, anyway,” I said.

  He gazed down at me for a moment or two, then stepped aside. We filed in. It smelled very musty inside Rewind. Two long rows of record racks disappeared into dim murkiness at the rear of the store, and colorful album covers hung from the ceiling. We all found ourselves eyeing one of them, mostly because it hung so low we couldn’t get by without giving it a little push, and the situation seemed too delicate for that.

  The hippie noticed what we were looking at and said, “Interested in Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band?”

  “What are some of their songs?” Silas said.

  A perfectly reasonable question from my point of view, but it reignited the hippie’s temper. “Get out, all of you. Go, go, go.” He made shooing motions with his hands, wafting some pretty bad BO our way.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “What’s wrong?” he said, his voice rising. “The state of civilization—how about we start right there? You think the persecution of vinyl is just an isolated event?”

  “Persecution of vinyl?” I was lost.

  “Nothing exists in a vacuum,” he said. “Don’t you even know that? We’re headed down the toilet on golden surfboards! Get it through your ridiculous twenty-first-century heads. The music’s over! Turn out the lights!”

  Sweat had broken out on the hippie’s forehead, and he didn’t look well. As for what he was talking about, I could only guess. A wild guess, maybe, but I went with it. “You’re upset about the New Brooklyn Redevelopment Project, right?”

  He went still, lost all the color in his face. His lips, thin and cracked, started tw
itching. “Who—who are you?” he said, backing away and striking the hanging album cover, which started twirling. “What do you want?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Information,” said Ashanti.

  He raised his hands, palms out. “Information?” His fingers were trembling.

  “For our school project,” Silas said.

  “Right,” I said. “School project.”

  “On vinyl,” Silas said.

  This time I poked him myself. “It’s on the New Brooklyn Redevelopment Project.”

  “For or against?” the hippie said.

  “Huh?”

  “You heard me—are you for or against?”

  “Against,” I said.

  “Y-y-ye-,” said Tut-Tut, so close to yeah that the hippie didn’t notice anything about how he talked.

  “Totally,” said Ashanti.

  “I second the emotion,” said Silas. Was there any point in poking him again? I decided not.

  Meanwhile the hippie was saying, “At least that’s one thing you’ve got right.” He smacked his fist into his open hand. “The bastards!”

  “Mr., uh,” I began.

  “Call me Bowlman,” the hippie said. “Everyone does.”

  “Well, Mr. Bowlman, what is—”

  “Just Bowlman,” he said. “No mister. I despise mister.”

  “Er, Bowlman,” I said, “why do you call them bastards?”

  “Because you’re just kids and I don’t want to say the words I really mean in front of young ears.”

  “We can take it,” Silas said.

  “Yeah?” said Bowlman, and he let loose a big, long string of bad words, one or two completely new to me, at least in the combinations Bowlman used.

  “So, uh, getting back to how come you feel that way,” I said, “why don’t—”

  “How come I feel this way? Because I’m a human being is why! And they’re bloodsuckers. Year two on a ten-year lease, black and white, but their lawyers found some stupid little mistake and got the whole thing torn up, and now they tripled the rent. Tripled!”

  “The lawyers for the New Brooklyn Redevelopment Project?” I said.

  “Parasites on the bloodsucker! And their hit man, Borg—don’t get me started on him!”

  “Hit man?” I said.

  “If you think you need a gun to be a hit man, then think again,” Bowlman said. “Not in this day and age. The writ, the suit, the threatening letter, have all the firepower they need. But this time”—he wagged his finger—“they picked the wrong guy.”

  “What are you going to do?” I said.

  “Take them all the way to the Supreme Court,” Bowlman said.

  “But won’t that be very expensive?” I said.

  “Not if I represent myself, which is exactly what I plan to do. I have my speech all worked out: ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the Supreme Court, today is your chance to strike a mighty blow for the little guy.’ You should have seen the look on Borg’s face when I told him. Surprise, buddy boy—the little guy bites back.”

  I thought of the list from the briefcase, with the Schlecks first and Rewind Enterprises second. Was it a list of little guys who bit back? “Do you know Tim and Maria Schleck?” I said.

  “Nope,” said Bowlman.

  At that moment, the door opened and a man entered. He looked somewhat like Bowlman, although with a less luxuriant ponytail. “Eddie Cochran, Live at Town Hall Party, 1959?” he said. “You’re my last hope.”

  “Give me a hard one,” said Bowlman.

  We all went home, Silas splitting off first, then Tut-Tut, leaving Ashanti and me together. As we turned onto our street, we saw a TV truck in front of Tim and Maria Schleck’s burned-out place, now behind fire department barricades. They had bright lights set up, lights that shone on the faces of an interviewer holding a mic and the interviewee, a tall handsome man with swept-back silvery hair and a nice fresh-looking tan: Sheldon Gunn. We went closer.

  “…a terrible tragedy,” Sheldon Gunn was saying, “losing such an irreplaceable old building.”

  “How long have you owned it, Mr. Gunn?” said the interviewer.

  “Oh, not too long, a year or so, perhaps. But as Brooklynites know, I’m a great one for historic preservation, so naturally I’m just devastated by this. Thank God the tenants—such a lovely young couple—were unharmed.”

  “What are your plans for the site?” the interviewer said.

  “Oh, too soon to say,” said Gunn. “But you can be assured we’ll do whatever is in the best interest of the neighborhood and the borough as a whole.”

  The interviewer leaned forward. I noticed that while her hair was soft and blond and fluffy, her face was hard and narrow. “How do you respond,” she said, “to critics who say the New Brooklyn Redevelopment Project is just an instrument for driving the poor out of the borough?”

  Gunn smiled, his teeth big and white and perfect. Sometimes, like when the eyes don’t join in, a fake smile is easy to spot, but Gunn’s eyes—small and grayish—were joining in. “Personally, Dina, I’m unaware of any such criticism. But if critics are out there, please come forward, identify yourselves, speak up. I guarantee you’ll have our full attention.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Gunn,” the interviewer said. “Dina DiNunzio, reporting from Brooklyn. Back to the studio.”

  Sheldon Gunn and Dina DiNunzio didn’t speak another word to each other. The bright lights went out, and the crew packed up. The other spectators, maybe a dozen, moved on. Gunn buttoned up his topcoat and turned toward his limo, parked a few doors farther down, but as he turned, he saw us. Saw me, to be accurate, and paused.

  “You don’t think he’s coming—” Ashanti began.

  But he was. He walked toward us, raised his eyebrows—thin and snow-colored—and said, “Robbie?”

  He remembered my name, just from that single meeting outside Bread? That was a shocker. The silver heart started fluttering against my wrist. I got the idea—completely crazy—that it was afraid.

  “Um, hi, Mr. Gunn.”

  “Ah, you remember me,” he said. “How is your lovely mother these days?”

  “Uh, fine.”

  “And who’s this bright-looking friend of yours?”

  “Ashanti,” I said. “Ashanti, this is Mr. Gunn.”

  He held out his hand. Very slowly, Ashanti extended hers. Their eyes met. Ashanti’s were icy; Gunn’s sparkled for a moment, like he was amused about something.

  “Pleasure to meet you, Ashanti,” he said. “And what a special name. A stroke of luck, running into your friend Robbie like this. You know why?”

  Ashanti shook her head.

  Gunn turned to me. “Because a very strange thing happened that morning we met outside that soup kitchen.” He paused. “Any idea what it was?”

  I shook my head.

  “None?” he said.

  “No.”

  “What if I gave you three guesses?”

  I felt myself squirming inside. This grown-up, this billionaire, was toying with a couple of kids. An answer came to me out of nowhere, and I blurted it out. “You suddenly felt what it’s like when the cupboard is bare?”

  He went still. So did Ashanti. Gunn’s face hardened in a way I’d never seen on anyone before, as though the skull beneath the skin was coming through. A long, long moment went by, and then he smiled, and in a flash, the illusion, if that was what it was, disappeared and he looked normal again, meaning normal for a rich, rested, handsome, and powerful middle-aged guy.

  “No, no,” he said. “Nothing so strange as that. But an interesting idea—I give you credit. I simply lost something that morning, but it might have been earlier or later. I didn’t notice until the afternoon. Maybe I was the victim of a common pickpocket, not that I’m suggesting that criminal types necessarily congregate around soup kitchens.”

  “What did you lose?” Ashanti said, pushing this way too far, in my opinion.

  Gunn gave Ashanti a close look, just for a second,
but in the second, I got the idea that some machine inside him switched on and scanned her mind. He was very smart, no doubt about that. “Nothing that can’t be replaced,” Gunn said. “Many times over.” He noticed his driver holding open the rear door of the limo. “Ah,” he said, “mustn’t keep Hector waiting.” He took a last look at the burned-out building. “So fortunate no one was hurt,” he said. Gunn got in the car, glanced out at us. “A pleasure running into you two. Take care.” Hector closed the door.

  When I got home, different-colored index cards were scattered all over the kitchen table. Index cards didn’t appear often, always meant my dad was having trouble with his book. I read a green one: Max gets an old memory wrong. And a blue one: someone else’s dry cleaning gets delivered, which means???

  Dad came into the room, a mug of coffee in his hand.

  “Hi, Dad. Who’s Max?”

  “That’s the question, all right.” He moved a few of the cards around with his fingertip. “It could almost be the title of the book.”

  Who’s Max? Didn’t do much for me. “Have you got a title yet?” I said. Titles were a total pain and very important at the same time, something I’d heard Dad and his writer friends talking about more than once.

  “The working title is Magic Spaces,” he said. “Or possibly A Magic Space. Or maybe The Magic Space. There’s also…” He got a faraway look in his eyes, then shook his head.

  “Wait,” I said. “The book’s about magic?”

  “In a broad sense.”

  “Like, um?”

  “Exalted states, I guess you’d say, their inevitable tendency to disappoint. The illusory triumph of the subjective and the relentlessness of the objective.”

  I didn’t get any of that, but pressed on anyway. “What kind of powers do the characters have?”

  “There’s really only one character, in the traditional sense of story.”

  I nodded. I’d never read a story with only one character, but I knew, also from hearing my dad and his writer friends, that publishers were always on the lookout for new things, so maybe this was good. “Okay,” I said, “this character—what are his powers?”

  “Powers?”

  “Magic powers,” I said. “X-ray vision, for example.”