The Outlaws of Sherwood Street: Giving to the Poor

by Peter Abrahams

  “Is Tut-Tut here?” I said.

  The door opened. Uncle Jean-Claude peered down at us, forty-ouncer in hand. He was tall and thin, and resembled Tut-Tut in some ways—they had the same high cheekbones, for example. But the effect was very different: Tut-Tut’s face was sweet, Jean-Claude’s mean. Over his shoulder I could see the TV, a futuristic war frozen on the screen.

  His bloodshot eyes went to me, then Ashanti, and back. Did he even remember me? He’d been pretty wasted the only time we’d met, a nasty occasion that had ended with Jean-Claude knocking Tut-Tut to the floor with a vicious backhand blow and Tut-Tut and me taking off. Recognition dawned, which I knew from his face getting meaner.

  “You,” he said.

  No denying that. “Is Tut-Tut here?” I said.

  He turned and called over his shoulder in a high voice, maybe mimicking me. “Boy! Are you here?”

  Silence.

  “Don’t look like it,” Jean-Claude said.

  “Do you know where he is?” I said. “He wasn’t in school today.”

  Jean-Claude put his hand over his chest in a dramatic sort of way. “Not in school today? How will he ever get ahead in this earthly life?”

  I could feel Ashanti’s anger rising. It jumped the space between us, like some kind of instant contagion, and set me off. “What the hell?” I said. “Why are you doing this? Just tell us!”

  For a moment, I thought Jean-Claude was about to get angry too. Instead he smiled and said, “Well, well. A hotheaded young chick.” He glanced at Ashanti. “Two hotheaded young chicks.” And now he did start to look angry, or at least annoyed. “How does that little retard get friends like you?”

  “He’s not a retard,” we said together.

  “No?” said Jean-Claude. “Then how come the INS grabbed him?”

  “Oh, no!” I said. “Is it true?”

  “Couldn’t be truer,” said Jean-Claude.

  “Why didn’t they grab you?” Ashanti said.

  “I’m no retard,” Jean-Claude said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a laminated card with his photo on it. “Plus, I have this, and he doesn’t.”

  “What is it?” I said.

  “A green card,” Jean-Claude said. His chin tilted up. “I’m as legal as you.”

  I gazed at the green card. It wasn’t even green. For some reason, that seemed important to me.

  “How did it happen?” Ashanti said.

  Jean-Claude shrugged.

  “Come on,” she said. “There must be illegal immigrants all over the city.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Why did they pick on Tut-Tut?”

  “Don’t ask me,” Jean-Claude said, but his eyes shifted, not meeting ours.

  “Oh, my God!” I said.

  “You dimed him out,” said Ashanti.

  Jean-Claude raised the forty-ouncer, practically poured it down his throat, then wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve. “Think what you want,” he said.

  What I wanted was to do something real bad to him. All I could think of was grabbing that green card, held loosely in his non-beer hand, so that was what I did.

  Jean-Claude called me a name I’m not going to repeat and tried to snatch it back, but he was slow and clumsy, maybe much drunker than I’d thought. I retreated into the hall, Ashanti right beside me. He took a step or two after us, his movements unsteady.

  “Where is he?” Ashanti said.

  “Tell us, and you get it back,” I said.

  He called me that name again, then tried out another ugly one on Ashanti. We just stood there, not saying a word. It wasn’t that we were being brave—at least in my case—more just that I was so worried and confused about Tut-Tut that I forgot to be afraid.

  “All right, have it your way,” Jean-Claude said. He held out his hand. “First the card.”

  I shook my head. “First the information,” said Ashanti.

  Jean-Claude thought for a moment or two, then nodded. “Sure,” he said, “for what good it will do you. They’ve got him down at the Flatbush Family Detention Center.”

  “But that’s like a jail,” Ashanti said.

  “Like?” said Jean-Claude. “Couldn’t be liker.”

  I tossed him the card, an accurate toss that he failed to catch. He bent to pick it up, and we were out of there.

  4

  We walked away from the projects and went left at the next cross street. The sign, hanging crookedly from a single bolt, read Sherwood Street. Sherwood Street was a strange street, only a single block long, and populated by no one. On the far side stood an abandoned gas station and a fenced-in scrap metal foundry that never seemed to be open; on our side were an empty and weedy trash-strewn lot and then a huge boarded-up warehouse. Ashanti and I turned into the alley that ran along the side of the warehouse and walked to the back.

  We glanced around, saw we were alone, and climbed up on the loading dock. The entrance to the warehouse was a big roll-down steel door, padlocked at the bottom, but set in the big steel door was a small door for people to use when they weren’t loading or unloading. The small door no longer had a knob—a metal plate covered the hole where the knob had been—and a piece of plywood covered the window space. The first time Tut-Tut had brought me here, he’d pried the plywood off with a butter knife. Now Silas had it rigged so all you had to do was point your cell phone and press 13. Why 13? That was Silas.

  I pointed my phone and pressed 13. The plywood cover swung open. Ashanti reached through the glassless space, opened the door from the inside. We entered, the plywood closing back in place automatically. Behind us a deep male voice said, “Welcome to the Casbah.” I’d freaked the first time that had happened, but it was just a sound clip from some old movie Silas had found.

  It was dim inside the warehouse—just a few narrow blades of light leaking in from places where the boarding up had been a little careless—but we knew our way. We moved along a row of tall floor-to-ceiling pillars to the lift at the far side of the warehouse, a square steel slab with no doors or windows. We stepped on the slab and pressed a button on the wall, a button Tut-Tut had painted with his purple tag in tiny form: vudu. The steel slab shuddered and slowly rose through an opening in the ceiling.

  At the floor level above, we came to a stop. We were in a small room with a desk, some office-type swivel chairs, and Tut-Tut’s spray paintings on the wall: parrots, flowers, butterflies, and the vudu tag again, much bigger, plus portraits of Tut-Tut, his dead parents (their eyes were closed), Jean-Claude, and all of us as a group—me, Ashanti, Silas, Tut-Tut. This was HQ, the secret place Tut-Tut had found, exactly how he’d never explained. His stutter made explaining things hard, especially long, complicated stories, and he ended up getting impatient with himself. Normally we’d have had to switch on the light—a single bulb hanging from the ceiling—but it was already on and Silas was sitting at the desk, eating fast-food fries.

  “My mistake, amigos,” he said. “I assumed you meant noon eastern time.”

  “You’ve got ketchup all over your face,” Ashanti said.

  Silas stuck out his tongue at a weird sideways angle, kind of like Pendleton, and licked ketchup off his cheek. It was a roundish sort of cheek, and Silas was a roundish sort of kid, red-haired with freckles and green eyes that took in everything. He had one of those very expressive faces, like an actor. Right now it was expressing self-satisfaction, maybe because he’d pulled the space heater right up beside him and was hogging all the heat.

  “Planning on sharing those fries?” I said.

  “Be my guest,” said Silas. “Although I should warn you I feel a cold coming on.”

  I left the fries alone, but not Ashanti, who grabbed the container and dug right in. Silas frowned at her.

  “What’s your problem?” she said, or something like that. Hard to tell with her mouth so full.

 
Silas shrugged. “Eat and be merry,” he said.

  But we weren’t feeling merry, me and Ashanti, and neither was Silas after we told him all the news.

  “Whoa,” he said. “Incoming! Incoming!” And he put his hands over his head.

  “Silas?” I said. “What are you doing?”

  “You dweeb,” said Ashanti.

  “I’m not a dweeb,” Silas said. “Not by any kind of strict definition.”

  “A geek?” said Ashanti.

  Silas looked offended. “A geek,” he said, “is a drunk who bites the heads off live chickens.”

  Ashanti stopped eating, put the fries on the desk.

  “I’m more like a nerd,” Silas said, helping himself to another handful, “if you really have to put a label on people.”

  “Sorry,” Ashanti said; kind of a surprise: had I ever heard her say sorry to anybody?

  But of course Silas had to blow it. “Apology graciously accepted,” he said.

  “Jerk,” Ashanti said.

  “Guys?” I said. Meaning enough. They both turned to me. “What are we going to do?” I said.

  “If only we still had the charm,” Silas said.

  “If only won’t get it done,” Ashanti said.

  “I’m not sure it would do any good,” I told them.

  “Huh?” they said.

  “I mean—did we have the charm or did it have us?”

  They thought about that. Then Silas said, “I still wish we had it. Maybe we could learn to scuba dive.”

  “And search where?” Ashanti said.

  “The bottom of the sea,” said Silas.

  “But exactly where? All we know is we were out there somewhere.”

  Ashanti was right about that. I could see it all, but not in the way you picture things that happened in real life, more the way you picture things that happened in a dream. One of those falling dreams in this case, falling off the helicopter deck of Boffo, falling and falling through the night and blowing snow, leveling out at the last moment, so close to death that my arm went plunging into the wild and icy waters, which was when I must have lost the leather bracelet with that strange silver heart.

  “Maybe you’re right,” Silas said. He had some sort of thought that made him frown. “Do you think the scuba diving people expect you to know how to swim?”

  “You don’t know how to swim?” I said.

  “It never came up.”

  “You’ve never been to the beach?” Ashanti said.

  “I don’t like the beach. I burn right away.” Silas stuck out his chin. “And what’s wrong with indoors? Indoors is a great human invention.”

  Uh-oh. Great human inventions was one of Silas’s favorite topics. This wasn’t the time.

  “Later, Silas,” I said. “What are we going to do? That’s the point.”

  “Simple,” he said. “We prioritize.”

  “Meaning?” I said.

  “Meaning start with the most—”

  “We know what prioritize means,” Ashanti said.

  “Then we’re all on the same page,” said Silas. “But are we in the same paragraph?” He laughed. We didn’t join in. That didn’t stop him. Finally he wiped away one of those laughter tears and said, “Bottom line, we have all these problems. Priority question—which one is the most important?”

  “Tut-Tut,” I said.

  “Prize for the little lady,” said Silas.

  “Silas?” said Ashanti, in a way she had—not necessarily loud but plenty forceful—of commanding everyone’s attention.

  “Oops,” said Silas.

  “We have to get Tut-Tut out of there,” I said.

  “Spring him,” Silas said.

  “Spring him?” said Ashanti.

  “That’s the expression for busting dudes out of jail,” Silas explained.

  “But how?” I said.

  We sat in silence. I gazed at Tut-Tut’s spray-painted self-portrait on the wall. He seemed to be gazing right back at me. There was so much inside him, including lots of pain he’d suffered, although he didn’t want anybody’s sympathy; I thought I could see all that in the picture.

  Silas snapped his fingers. Not one of his talents: he tried it a few more times, barely making a sound. “Anyway,” he said, giving up, “I’ve got it. We’ll make him a green card.”

  “How?”

  “Nothing to it,” Silas said. “There’s a bunch of good programs for that kind of thing. All we need is some green paper and—”

  “Green cards aren’t green,” I said.

  “No?”

  “And even if we had a green card, how do we get it to him?” I said.

  “And even if we get it to him, then what?” says Ashanti. “He flashes it to a guard or something and the doors open, just like that?”

  “Why not?” said Silas.

  I didn’t know the answer, but I did know that in the adult world, doors never seemed to open just like that.

  We did more sitting in silence. The getting-nowhere feeling pressed down on me like a heavy cloud. Do something, Robbie! That was a voice inside me I sometimes heard, my own voice, often inclined to panic: the voice I thought of as the innermost Robbie.

  I rose. “Let’s go take a look at the Flatbush Family Detention Center.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Ashanti said.

  “We’re going outside?” said Silas.

  We gave him a look. He got ready, meaning he buttoned up his cardigan—I’d never seen another human being in a cardigan—wrapped a scarf around his neck, struggled into his Michelin-Man-type jacket, and pulled on an Arctic-explorer-type hat with fur flaps and a pair of mittens. Yes, mittens.

  • • •

  The Flatbush Family Detention Center wasn’t actually on Flatbush Avenue, the most important street in the borough, but a few blocks north, so we had to walk from the subway station, a slow walk, on account of a wind springing up right in our faces and the fact of Silas being too bundled up to move well. We passed a few old office low-rises and a fire station, and came to a massive brick building on a corner. It looked something like a school except that the windows were barred, the brick walls were grimier than any school walls I’d ever seen, and two cops stood by the front door. There was no sign out front.

  “This is it,” Ashanti said.

  The cops looked at us. We looked at them.

  “Help you kids?” one of them said.

  Ashanti stepped forward. “We’ve got a friend in there.”

  “Yeah?” said the other cop.

  “Yeah,” said Ashanti.

  I stepped forward too, at the same time sensing Silas backing away. “We want to see him.”

  “Gotta make arrangements,” the second cop said.

  “How?” I said.

  “Go online,” said the first cop. “Click on visitation.”

  “Okay,” said Silas, behind us. “Thanks.”

  We walked away, not in the direction we’d come from; I had some vague feeling about going around the corner, checking out the rest of the building.

  Behind me, Ashanti said, “You came close to saying ‘thanks, officer,’ didn’t you?”

  “No way,” Silas said. “Plus, how I said thanks was loaded with contempt.”

  “Right,” Ashanti said. “They’re probably discussing whether or not to cuff you.”

  Silas whipped around, looked back.

  • • •

  We turned the corner, kept going, the grimy wall looming above us. Halfway down the block, we came to an archway in the wall, maybe once an entrance for deliveries. The opening was barred now by crisscrossing black metal bars so close together you probably couldn’t have squeezed your head through. Beyond the bars, at the far end of the covered barrel space of the arch, were more crisscrossing bars in the same arrangement
, and beyond those bars lay a small and treeless paved yard, no one in it. At least no one in the part I could see, almost like a narrow stage framed by the sides of the archway.

  “Come on,” Silas said. “I’m freezing.”

  I ignored him, but glanced over at Ashanti. She was stamping her feet, maybe feeling the cold, too. For some reason, I did not.

  “Anyone carrying green?” Silas said. “Hot chocolate would go down real nice. With a marshmallow on top.”

  At that moment, from offstage, if that’s how to put it, a rock or maybe a chunk of broken pavement came bouncing across the yard. Then a small figure in a hoodie that was much too big for him came into view and gave the rock a kick. He moved after it, not looking at us: a small figure in a too-big hoodie, torn jeans—nothing hip or cool about those tears—and my old white sneakers with the blue trim, both of them now laceless. And no socks, despite the cold. That—the no socks part—bothered me more than anything, kind of crazy. I called his name.

  “Tut-Tut.”

  5

  Tut-Tut turned quickly, and the look on his face—or more accurately the way it changed, from deep inward sadness and worry to pure joy—was something I know I’ll never forget. He ran to the inner barrier, grabbed the bars and said, “R-r-r-r-r-r-.” Words starting with R were extra hard for Tut-Tut, even in those rare periods when his speech came a little more easily. Not counting the times when the silver heart had worked its magic: then I’d heard him really speak. The very first word he’d uttered, maybe in his whole life, was ow.

  We all pressed up against the outer barrier, meaning Tut-Tut was about ten or fifteen feet away.

  “Tut-Tut,” Ashanti said, “how are you?”

  I could see how he was: too skinny, those cheekbones too prominent now, plus his dreads seemed limp and lifeless and even dirty—and maybe worst of all—his lip was split.