The Outlaws of Sherwood Street: Giving to the Poor

by Peter Abrahams

  “G—,” he said, “g-g-g-g-g-g-g—”

  But of course he was just about the furthest thing from good.

  “Hey,” Silas said, “what happened to your lip?”

  Tut-Tut’s face darkened, but only for a moment and then he shook it off, looking happy again. “N-n-n-n-n-n-n-no-noth-th-th-th-th-,” he said. “I-I-I-I’m o-o-k-k-k-k-k—”

  “What’s going on in this place, Tut-Tut?” I said. “Is anyone helping you?”

  “N-n-n-n-n—”

  “But they must tell you something,” I said, “like about what’s happening—you know, the, um . . .”

  “Procedures,” Silas said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “There must be some kind of procedures.” That was one thing I’d learned: the adult world had procedures for just about everything. And here’s another: some people, like Sheldon Gunn, for example, were way better than others at making the whole procedure thing work for them.

  “P-p-p-p-pr-pr-pr-,” Tut-Tut said. Then he made his hand into a gun and shot some imaginary thing in the air, most likely the whole concept of procedures. I laughed, even though there was nothing funny about this situation, the exact opposite. And when I laughed, Tut-Tut smiled—wincing a bit on account of his split lip—and then he stuck his hand, sort of grayish from the cold, through one of the small squares formed by the crisscrossing bars, and gave a little wave. Meanwhile his split lip had opened up and blood was oozing out; he didn’t seem to notice.

  “We’ve got to get you out,” Ashanti said.

  “H-h-h-h-h-,” said Tut-Tut. His stuttering had never been so bad.

  How. That was the question all right. Then an idea hit me, kind of late arriving considering my mom’s job. “Have you got a lawyer?” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “But you must have a lawyer,” I said.

  Tut-Tut made the gesture for money, rubbing his thumb and index finger together.

  “They have to give you a lawyer,” I said, turning to the others. “Don’t they? It’s on all the cop shows.”

  “We don’t have a TV,” Silas said. “Didn’t I ever mention that?”

  “But you must know about Miranda,” Ashanti said.

  “Who’s she?” said Silas.

  The flip side of Silas knowing stuff no one else did was that he didn’t know stuff that was common knowledge and took no effort to learn, like celebrity divorce news, for example.

  “Miranda rights,” Ashanti said. “Or maybe it was the Gideon case. We took this in class, but Mr. Stinecki had a bad cold that day and no one could understand him. The point is that criminals have the right to a lawyer even if they can’t pay.”

  “Tut-Tut’s not a criminal,” I said.

  Tut-Tut shook his head vigorously. He was no criminal. So what was he doing behind bars?

  “Tut-Tut,” I said, “I’m going to talk to my mom—I’m sure she’ll know the right kind of lawyer.” Somewhere out of sight a loud buzzer went off. Tut-Tut glanced to the side in the direction the sound had come from.

  “G-g-g-g-g . . .” What was it going to be? Got to go? Good-bye? I didn’t know. Tut-Tut tried and tried to get it out, and then gave up and did something I’d never seen him do before, namely pound his fist into his open hand, totally frustrated.

  From somewhere in the yard came a man’s yell. “Hey! Don’t hear so good? Move!”

  Tut-Tut turned to go.

  “Wait,” Ashanti said. “Silas—those stupid mittens—toss them to Tut-Tut.”

  “My mittens?”

  “You can get new ones.”

  “But—”

  Ashanti grabbed the mittens right off Silas’s hands, folded one into the other, made a sort of ball. This wasn’t going to be easy, but Ashanti pretty much made it look that way. She stuck her arm through one of the barred squares and backhanded the mitten ball right through a square on the other side. Tut-Tut caught it.

  “Th-th-th-th-th—”

  “I have to say it once more, you ain’t gonna like it,” the unseen man called.

  Tut-Tut gave us another tiny wave, and then he was gone. Silas stuffed his bare hands deep into his pockets.

  • • •

  We got off the train, climbed up to street level, Silas headed one way, me and Ashanti in another. As we parted, Silas said, “You guys thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “If it’s about your mittens, I’m going to smack you,” Ashanti said.

  Silas stepped back. “I was thinking—what’s the melting temperature for those metal bars? Tut-Tut’s pretty small—we’d probably only have to melt through one or two.”

  “Sounds interesting,” I said.

  “It does?” said Ashanti.

  But Silas looked pleased. The lawyer idea was plan A, but how could it hurt to have a backup?

  Ashanti and I walked home. We actually live on the same block, practically across the street from each other. Ashanti’s mom was maybe the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen; she’d been a model but had now aged out of the modeling business and didn’t seem to go out much. Her dad was a film editor who traveled a lot; I still hadn’t met him.

  We came to Monsieur Señor’s, this coffee place where my dad often wrote when he got sick of being home alone. I didn’t see him in there now, but Monsieur Señor’s had these little chocolate mint squares I loved.

  “Wanna grab something to eat?” I said.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  I glanced over at Ashanti. Her eyes had a faraway look.

  “You ready to tell me whatever it is you’re not telling me?” I said.

  “You’re so damn persistent,” she said. “If you must know—”

  “Hey! I don’t need to know—”

  “I think my dad’s . . . seeing someone.”

  “Seeing someone?” I said. “What does that mean?”

  “Come on! Seeing someone, for God’s sake,” Ashanti said, her voice rising in real fury. “Do I have to spell it out? Another woman.”

  “He’s having an affair?”

  “What a stupid expression!” Ashanti said.

  I started getting angry, too. “That’s not my fault—I didn’t make it up. It’s the expression.”

  Ashanti glared down at me. Then her face changed completely, and she actually started to laugh. “What is it about you?” she said.

  “Huh?”

  She shook her head, made a fist, tapped me lightly on the shoulder. “Thatcha,” she said.

  I tapped her back. “Comin’ atcha,” I said. That was a school-spirity thing we did at Thatcher, always with an ironic undertone, very Thatcherite, as I was learning fast.

  Ashanti took a deep breath, let it out slowly in a round breath cloud that rose like a balloon. “Maybe it’s not true,” she said. “But I can’t think of another explanation.”

  “For what?”

  “This text I saw on his phone.”

  “You were snooping on his phone?”

  “Hell, no. But he left it in the bathroom, right by the sink, and it beeped while I was brushing my teeth, practically right in my face. And the message was, quote, miss u so much!!! Three exclamation marks.”

  I thought that over, hoping to come up with some harmless explanation, like . . . but I couldn’t. So why did I then hear myself saying, “I’m sure there’s a harmless explanation.”

  “Like?”

  “I’ll think of one,” I said.

  “When you do, let me know.” Ashanti turned and climbed up the stairs to her front door, moving much slower and heavier than normal. I went home.

  • • •

  At this hour, mid-afternoon on a weekday, you might find my dad at home, in the office, gazing at the screen or rearranging Post-it Notes on his storyboard wall or in the kitchen taking a coffee break, but you’d never find my mom. Associ
ates in big Manhattan law firms like Jaggers and Tulkinghorn worked long hours. My mom hardly ever got home before seven and usually put in another hour or two after dinner. So seeing them both at the kitchen table was a surprise.

  They turned to me as I came in. Then came another surprise: my mom had been crying. Uh-oh. My very first thought? My dad was having an affair. Which was impossible. That wasn’t my dad, and besides, my parents loved each other a lot. I was surer of that than just about anything in my whole life, so sure I didn’t even question why I was so sure.

  “Mom? Dad? Is something wrong?”

  They looked at each other, then back at me. Both my parents are young looking for their ages—forty-one for my mom, thirty-nine for my dad—but especially my dad, with his unlined face and thick hair, scruffy like a hipster college kid and untouched by gray. All of a sudden and for no reason, I found myself wishing he looked older, a totally whacked-out thought.

  “I guess we should tell her,” my dad said.

  “What?” I said. “Tell me what?” Had someone died, someone closer to my mom than my dad? Nonna! Nonna was my grandmother on my mom’s side, lived in Arizona, played golf every day and also went to Zumba and Pilates classes, and hadn’t even been sick, at least not that I’d known, but car accidents happened, and Nonna always drove too fast, and—

  My mom licked her lips. “I,” she began, then started again. “I’ve been let go.”

  Let go? Was that the gentler way of saying . . . “Fired?” I said. And regretted it immediately. How harsh it must have sounded, completely unintended: all I’d been trying to do was get an exact grip on what being let go meant.

  My mom’s eyes filled with tears, but they didn’t spill out, and she made no crying sound, which I sensed was all about appearing strong in front of me, a major act of will on her part, even heroic. “Yes,” she said. “Fired.”

  “But how can they do that, Mom?” I remembered something about how well her last review had gone. “You’re so great at your job, and you work so hard.” I actually threw in a forbidden adjective between so and hard, but they didn’t seem to catch it.

  “You’re damn right,” my dad said.

  “Chas,” my mom said, “I already told you—none of that factors in. They got rid of thirty-five associates today, as well as forty-two paralegals and support staff, plus five partners, which is practically unheard of.”

  “But why, Mom? Is it the economy?” I would have had trouble defining economy in good Thatcherite style. Summing up my knowledge, the economy was bad, had been bad for a long time, and angry people were always arguing about it on the channels I didn’t watch.

  “Partly the economy, yes,” my mom said. “Revenues are way down.”

  “Revenues?”

  “The money coming into the firm from work we—from the work done.”

  Less revenue meant you fired people? Out of the blue came the kind of thought I never had, namely the logical solution to a big problem. “Instead of firing people, why don’t all the lawyers just take less pay till things get better?”

  “Exactly!” my dad said. “Right on the nail! And here’s the answer to your question, Robbie, in five letters—G-R-E-E-D.”

  My mom held up her hand. “Pointless to get into all that. It won’t help. And it’s even possible that something of that nature could have happened, but not after the Sheldon Gunn fiasco.”

  My heart went from beating away like normal, meaning I was unaware of it, to a pounding in my chest that couldn’t be ignored. “Sheldon Gunn fiasco?” I said.

  “I’m sure I mentioned it,” my mom said. “The day after the snowstorm, when the New Brooklyn Redevelopment Project deal fell apart, he fired us—and he was one of our biggest clients, worth millions to the firm every year.”

  “I never understood why it fell apart in the first place,” my dad said.

  But I sure did.

  “It was the financing,” my mom said. “His Saudi partners backed out.”

  “Why?”

  “Something to do with our—Christ, I’ll have to stop saying that—with the Jaggers and Tulkinghorn capital formation department and Egil Borg’s people, but I don’t really know. I never worked on any of it.”

  Egil Borg: a nasty and dangerous man I’d never wanted to think of again. I went over and hugged my mom. “It’s so unfair. You had nothing to do with it.”

  “Collateral damage,” my mom said. A few tears did come after that, my mom’s and mine, too. My dad got up and patted our backs.

  6

  Don’t worry,” my dad said. “Everything’s going to be just fine.”

  “Of course it is,” my mom said, breaking up our little group hug. “I’ll just go and change into something”—she raised her arms in a funny way, like she didn’t know how she’d come to be dressed how she was, in one of her charcoal-gray work suits—“more comfortable.” She went upstairs.

  I looked at my dad. He looked at me.

  “Your mom’s a star, Robbie,” he said. “She’ll find something in no time.”

  “Something like what, Dad?”

  “Another law firm, of course. There must be more law firms in New York than in any other city in the world.”

  “But do they all handle that debt stuff mom does?” I said.

  “Good question,” my dad said. “I’m sure lots of them must. New York’s the center of finance, too, and debt’s all part of that.”

  “What does Mom do?” I said. “I mean exactly.”

  “Exactly?” my dad said. “It’s all about structuring debt.”

  “Structuring? I thought it was restructuring. Which is it?”

  “That’s another good question,” my dad said. “But the point is it’s highly specialized, and it couldn’t be clearer that highly specialized is the way to go in this particular zeitgeist.”

  Zeitgeist? What the heck was that? For some reason, totally unfair, I was starting to feel annoyed at my dad. He was only trying to stop me from worrying, so it couldn’t have been his fault that worry was suddenly growing inside me like a real thing, taking up all the air.

  “Who knows?” he said. “She might even find something better. The culture at Jaggers left a lot to be desired.”

  “What do you mean, Dad?”

  “The way they treat people,” my dad said, and he was about to say more, but at that moment my mom came downstairs, now wearing jeans and the college sweatshirt she’d brought back from her last reunion; she loved the purple cow on the front, although it couldn’t have been dorkier in my opinion.

  “What are you guys talking about?” she said. She’d removed the little bit of makeup she wore for work, now looked kind of pale.

  “I was just telling Robbie that we’re all right, and we’ll be all right,” my dad said.

  My mom nodded but didn’t add anything to that.

  “Dad says you’ll find something else in no time,” I said.

  “Does he?” she said, and gave my dad a quick, sharp look.

  My dad ran a hand through his hair, this gesture he has when he’s feeling uncomfortable. “Just making the point that you’re so talented, Jane, so good at what you do.”

  “A lot of talented people got the ax today,” my mom said. She turned to me. “But, yes, I’ve got tons of contacts, and there’s that headhunter who’s always calling—I’ll get started first thing.”

  Axes? Headhunters? It all sounded so violent and primitive. “Do we have, like, savings?” I said.

  “Savings?” my dad said. “Sure we do.”

  “To a point,” my mom said. “There’s no immediate danger. And don’t forget my severance pay.”

  No immediate danger? For some reason that sounded very dangerous. What was that quote of Ashanti’s? When sorrows come, they come not single something or other but in something or other else? Was it true of all bad thi
ngs? Suddenly I thought of Tut-Tut, locked up in that horrible place. I had it easy compared to him. Get a grip, Robbie. But as for my plan—persuading my mom to find a lawyer for Tut-Tut—this didn’t seem like the right time.

  My dad rubbed his hands together, like he was trying to warm things up. “Tell you what,” he said. “Let’s hit Local for an early dinner.”

  “Is that what we should be doing now?” my mom said.

  “More than ever,” said my dad. “We live our normal lives. Why not?” He went over to her, took her in his arms, and gave her a kiss that was—how should I put this?—on the passionate side. What kid wants to see her parents like that? Not this one. And maybe the timing was off for my mom, too, because she kind of pushed him away.

  “I was thinking I’d just warm up that lamb stew,” my mom said.

  “Leftovers?” said my dad. “Come on—it’ll be my treat. I got a royalty check today.”

  “You did?” my mom said.

  “What’s a royalty check?” I said.

  “Profit on book sales,” my dad said. “Sheer beautiful profit.”

  “Is it for On/Off?” my mom said, On/Off being my dad’s most recent book, two or three years old now, the thousand-page one I’d once heard him call “more of an experiment than anything else.”

  My dad frowned. “All But the Shouting,” he said, that being the first book, even older, which had to be good news, money coming in after all this time.

  So we went to Local and had an early dinner. Local was the cool neighborhood bar at the moment, serving Uruguayan-inspired tapas. I think I had something made from small birds, but might have misunderstood the waiter. It was delicious. We had a fun time, although conversation died away at the end a bit, Mom getting a faraway look in her eye. Later, on my way to bed, I happened to glance into the office, and on the desk I spotted what looked like a check. Next thing I knew I was at the desk, sort of hovering very lightly, like I wasn’t really there. Yes, my dad’s check, sheer beautiful profit. In the memo line place at the bottom left corner of the check it read All But the Shouting, annual royalties. The amount was $42.78.