The crowd, with us in it, got pushed back onto the sidewalk, clearing the way for Sheldon Gunn, the mayor, and other well-dressed people to drive off in limos. That was when I finally noticed the most obvious thing about the whole scene, what anyone else would have noticed from the get-go, namely the yellow crane that rose high above the scaffolding, bearing a huge red banner with gold lettering: GUNN TOWER. It snapped so loudly in the wind I could hear it from way down on the ground.
I lowered my eyes, found Dina DeNunzio among the people still by the barricades, watched her getting into the TV truck. A mistake: some people knew when they were being watched. Dina was one of them. She paused, scanned our side of the street, looked me right in the eye. Then she raised up her index finger to the driver, like she was telling him to wait.
“Let’s go,” I said.
Ashanti was on the move at once, but Silas, gazing at his feet, hadn’t heard. I took him by the hand. We went.
• • •
“Silas?” I said when we’d gone a few blocks. “What’s the story?”
“Huh?”
Ashanti, still a step or two in front of us, stopped, turned, and put a hand on Silas’s chest. “Someone as smart as you can’t play dumb. It just won’t fly.”
“You think I’m smart?” Silas said.
“Shut up,” she told him. “Shut up and spill the beans.”
“About what?”
“The dude with the braids, of course,” Ashanti said. “Is he really your father?”
Silas gave a little nod.
“And?”
“And they got divorced, like I already maybe mentioned.”
“Know something?” Ashanti said. “You’re the most pigheaded person I ever met.”
“Then allow me to introduce you to yourself,” said Silas.
“Whoa,” I said. “Just stop, both of you.” I tugged them into the recessed doorway of an out-of-business clothing store. We were sheltered from the wind in a quiet little space, close together, our breath clouds merging into one. “Let’s have it, Silas,” I said.
“In A-through-Z format, if possible,” Ashanti added.
Silas thought about that. I could see he was very upset, but still his mind couldn’t help running on Silas-type tracks. At that moment, I liked him a whole lot.
“Z would have to be the divorce,” he said. “And we’ll make A when they met, my mom and him, which was in college. How about F for when Thaddeus came along, and X for me, four years later? In between F and X was when he went to grad school—totally supported by my mother—and got obsessed with Native American history. Like, to the point of wanting to be Indian himself. He did all this research and, for a while, thought he’d found a Mohawk ancestor, but it all fell apart, and after that, he started to get mean. My mom—call this Y—told him he should see a therapist. He hit her—”
“Oh, my God!” Ashanti and I said, speaking as one.
“And she threw him out. Z.”
“That’s terrible,” I said.
Silas shrugged. “It was tough on Thaddeus,” he said. “I was too young to get affected.” But as he spoke, tears welled up and spilled down his cheeks. He didn’t make a crying sound, or even look particularly sad, but those tears kept coming. Ashanti wrapped her arms around him and then tilted her head down a bit—she was much taller than Silas—and kissed him on the forehead. Silas looked shocked. His tears dried up fast.
• • •
“He does send child support,” Silas said when we were back in motion, headed for the Flatbush Family Detention Center. “He’s got a good job.”
“Doing what?” said Ashanti.
“He works on the Native American floor in the museum and teaches a bit. Thaddeus says he has a pretty cool apartment in Greenpoint.”
“Let me guess,” Ashanti said. “Thaddeus wanted to move in with him, and your father turned him down.”
Silas’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “How do you know that?”
“Just makes sense,” Ashanti said. “Fathers being what they are.”
“What do you mean?” Silas said.
“Forget it,” Ashanti told him.
• • •
By the time we got to the detention center, the sky was darkening—so early—and tiny pellets of something between rain and snow were swirling in the air. From somewhere not far away came the sound of a Christmas carol being played on a tinkly instrument. We walked quickly past the entrance and turned the corner, the tall, grimy wall rising on our left. We came to the archway and peered through the two sets of bars into the barren yard. No one was there.
“This is around when we came the last time,” I said.
“No logic there,” said Silas.
Ashanti ignored him—ignored both of us—stepped right up to the bars and yelled, “Tut-Tut! Tut-Tut!”
“What makes you think he can even—” Silas began.
And then Tut-Tut came running, a smile spreading on his face. He looked skinnier than before, wore the same too-big hoodie, torn jeans, my old laceless sneakers—and no mittens.
“Tut-Tut,” I said, “where are the mittens?”
A totally dumb remark, like I was his mother or something and, worse, the nagging kind.
His smile faded. “Th-th-th-th-th-,” he began, then glanced over his shoulder.
“Someone stole them?” I said.
“Y-y-y-ye-ye-ye-ye . . .”
A jet of anger went right through me. I’d never felt so purely angry in my life. So it was kind of surprising that the charm had no reaction, lay cold against my skin.
“I could give him these,” Silas said, “but they’d just steal them again.”
“Forget it,” Ashanti said. “We’re here to bust him out.”
Tut-Tut’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “H-h-h-h-h-?”
“We’ve got the charm,” Ashanti said. “If this isn’t injustice what is? All set?”
Tut-Tut nodded a series of fast little nods.
“Anybody around back there?” Ashanti said.
Tut-Tut looked around again, shook his head.
“Robbie?” said Ashanti.
I moved closer and examined the bars. If I made four unwelds, if that was what to call them, a nice-sized square would open up, plenty of room for Tut-Tut to squeeze through. I held the charm up close to the intersection of two waist-level bars. Now all we needed was heat. Magic time.
11
Nothing happened. Not one single thing. What had I been expecting? Probably some sort of energy shining out of the charm, melting right through the metal, opening a Tut-Tut-sized hole. But anything would have done—Tut-Tut rising up and soaring over the wall, the wall itself crumbling down, a sinkhole appearing in the ground under the archway. The charm reacted to injustice and if Tut-Tut being locked up in this horrible place for nothing he’d ever done wasn’t injustice, then what was?
“Nothing seems to be happening,” Silas said. “At least not noticeably.”
“We can see that,” Ashanti said. “The question is—what are we going to do about it?”
We gazed at Tut-Tut. He gazed at us. The tinkly Christmas carol music grew a bit louder. That made me think about A Christmas Carol—even though I couldn’t remember if there were any Christmas carols in the movie—and my dad saying it was sentimental crap. Not the moment for thoughts like that, but the mind wasn’t so easy to control, at least not mine. Was Sheldon Gunn like Scrooge? I tried to imagine Sheldon Gunn realizing the error of his ways like Scrooge in the end, and couldn’t. My dad was right.
“Here’s a logical thought,” Silas said. “The charm has an injustice trigger point, and we’re not there.”
“You’re saying this isn’t unjust enough?” Ashanti said.
“Logic is saying it,” Silas said. “I’m just the messenger.”
Tut-Tut laughed.
A quiet little laugh. So nice to hear—there was no impediment to his laughter—but laughing at a time like this? Seeing something funny in the situation? We had to get him out.
“Maybe,” I said, “it’s not injustice that sets the charm off, but our reaction.”
“Our reaction to the injustice?” Ashanti said. “How much we feel it?”
“Something like that,” I said.
“Makes sense,” Ashanti said.
“In what way?” said Silas.
She reached out toward him. He flinched, but she was only taking his hand. She held mine, too.
“Close your eyes,” she said. “On three. Feel it. One, two, three.”
I closed my eyes and right away pictured this quick sketch Tut-Tut had once made for me, a sketch about how he’d lost his parents on the way to America. Just a few penciled strokes in a spiral notebook: a rough, empty ocean; a broken mast adrift in the waves; a small figure clinging to it. And from deep inside me this powerful feeling came rising up, part anger, part pity, and other parts I couldn’t name. At the same time, Ashanti squeezed my hand tight, and I just knew something similar was going on in her. But from the charm, still in my other hand, still aimed at the bars, I felt nothing.
I opened my eyes. Nothing it was.
“Next theory,” Silas said.
“How about you coming up with it?” I said, getting rid of some of my anger on him.
“Yeah,” said Ashanti, maybe doing the same thing. “I felt nothing from you. What were you thinking of?”
“Injustice, just like you,” Silas said.
“What specifically?” said Ashanti.
Silas opened his mouth, hesitated.
“Spill it,” I told him.
“I was thinking about Étienne Lenoir,” Silas said.
“Who the hell is he?” said Ashanti.
“The inventor of the internal combustion engine, but he died poor and no one remembers.”
I wanted to strangle him.
“I want to strangle you,” Ashanti said.
Silas backed away. “What? What? The inventor of the internal combustion engine dies poor? Automobiles, anybody? GM, Ford, Honda, BMW? The interstate highway system? Rest stops? Hello?”
“Zip it,” I said. “This isn’t getting us anywhere.” I looked through the bars at Tut-Tut, the double pattern of steel crisscrossing his whole body and face. “Tut-Tut?” I said. “Any ideas?”
He shook his head. It was getting darker. I remembered this same sort of sky on our first visit to the detention center, when an angry guard had called Tut-Tut inside. That could happen again at any second. And then what? We were helpless!
The wind blew stronger, bringing that tinkly Christmas carol with it, more distinct now. I was thinking so hard—and getting nowhere—that I barely noticed Tut-Tut cocking his head to the sound. And then he opened his mouth and began to sing.
“It came upon a midnight clear, that glorious song of old.”
I’d forgotten that when Tut-Tut sang, the stuttering went away, also forgotten how well he did it, hitting all the notes right in the middle, something I’d been unable to do in my one year of forced piano lessons, and the piano was supposed to hit the notes in the middle for you. But there was no time to think about any of that, because when Tut-Tut got to midnight, the charm vibrated very slightly in my hand, and I heard a heavy metallic click, more like a clonk, the kind of sound a real heavy lock might make. And the next moment, the two gates, inner and outer, swung open.
“Wha-wha-wha-,” Tut-Tut began. An alarm went off somewhere behind him, loud and piercing Bwa-BWAAA bwa-BWAAA bwa-BWAAA.
“Tut-Tut! Run!”
He ran to us, through the gates. I grabbed his hand. “Come on!”
We took off, not toward the front of the detention center, but the other way, down this side street. Ashanti sprinted out in front, with me and Tut-Tut not far behind. I glanced back. Could it be true? Silas wasn’t actually running, just walking fast?
“Silas! Run!”
He picked up the pace. Was it running? Ms. Kleinberg, my basketball coach at Thatcher, said that in running there’s a moment in every stride when both feet are off the ground. By that definition, no, Silas was not running.
“Run!”
“I’m running, I’m running! I’m just not that speedy.” Huff puff. “Relatively.”
“Both feet off the ground! Run!”
“Both feet off the ground?” He tried it, and all of a sudden—for the first time in his life?—Silas was running. Not fast, not average, not just below average—slow, real slow, but running. Silas: probably the smartest person I’d ever met, but he’d had to be taught how to run.
We ran. From behind came the bwa-BWAAA of the alarm and some shouting. I glanced back, saw two uniformed guards in the distance. Silas, all red-faced and sweaty, still far ahead of them, had somehow discovered a running style that kept both feet off the ground way too long, meaning his horizontal progress was even worse than I’d thought.
“Silas! Hurry! We’ve got to get around the corner.”
“This hurts my ankles.”
“Run! They’re catching up!”
“They are?” Silas turned his head to glance back. A mistake: I knew that from the get-go, saw the whole thing coming. He tripped over his own feet and sprawled in the gutter. The two guards picked up the pace, and now more guards came into view behind them.
“Silas! Get up!”
Silas seemed to be moving in slow motion. He rolled over, sat up, and—oh, no! was it possible? Yes: he was tying his shoelace.
“Silas!” I was so busy yelling at Silas and basically going out of my mind, that I completely missed Tut-Tut coming from the other direction. He blew right by me, racing back at top speed to rescue Silas.
“Tut-Tut—no!”
He didn’t seem to hear me. He reached Silas, pulled him to his feet, and started tugging him along. The guards were closing in, less than half a block away, but there was still a chance, if only we could make it to the next corner. Then, from out of nowhere, a green car with a flashing roof light zoomed up, right beside Tut-Tut and Silas, and a uniformed man jumped out while it was still moving. He grabbed Tut-Tut with both hands and threw him into the car. It squealed around in a tight U-turn and sped off the other way.
The other guards surrounded Silas. I crept closer, Ashanti right behind me. Maybe they didn’t realize we’d all been together: they showed no interest in me and Ashanti. They glared down at Silas, looking real mad. Silas looked real small. He tilted his head up to face them.
“I’m a citizen,” he said. “I have rights.”
“You have the right to have the crap beaten out of you,” one of the guards said. “What’s your relationship to that little escape artist?”
“He’s a kid I know.”
“From where?”
“Here,” said Silas. “Brooklyn. Where he lives.”
“Not for long,” said another guard. “He’ll be back down under the palm trees so fast it’ll make your head spin. Now tell us how you got him out of the yard.”
“Uh,” said Silas. “Me? I didn’t do anything.”
“No? Then how’d he get the gate to open up?”
Silas paused. From thirty or forty feet away, I could feel him thinking. “We closed our eyes and willed it to happen.”
The guards seemed to swell up. “You making fun of us?”
“No, no,” said Silas, shaking his head violently back and forth.
“What’s your name?”
“Silas.”
“Let’s see some ID, Silas.”
“I don’t have any,” he told them. “I’m a homeschool kid.”
The guards looked at one another. “What a crazy city,” one said.
They shuffled around, starting to lose interest in Sila
s. “Could be a software glitch,” one said.
“Or a hacker.”
All of a sudden, Silas looked intrigued. “A hacker?” he said, at the exact moment when he should have been keeping his stupid mouth shut.
They focused on him again. “Huh? What are you saying?”
“I never thought of hacking the system,” Silas said. “It didn’t even occur to me. Can you believe it?”
The guards gazed down at him, now like he was some strange specimen. “Are all homeschooled kids as weird as you?” one said.
• • •
When the guards left, we gathered together without a word and got on the first bus that came along. We sat by ourselves at the back, feeling dismal.
“What are we going to do?” Ashanti said.
“We could go back tomorrow,” I said. “Take another swing at it.”
“Meaning he sings ‘It Came Upon a Midnight Clear’ again?” she said. “And what makes you think they’ll even let him in the yard anymore?”
“Don’t get mad at me,” I said.
“I think I’ve got a high ankle sprain,” Silas said. “That means ligament damage. In case anybody’s interested.”
No one was. We rode in silence, our minds—mine, at least, on Tut-Tut. Out on the street, normal life went on. A man and woman emerged from a Chinese restaurant. A taxi pulled up. The man—very-good looking, with beautifully shaped hands that reminded me of Ashanti’s—glanced quickly around and then kissed her on the mouth. He jumped into the cab, and it sped off, the woman—also good-looking, maybe somewhat younger than the man—watching it disappear in traffic. It hit me—for the first time! pretty late in the game!—that I’d probably have a boyfriend someday, or would want to.
“I’ve got an idea,” I said. “How does hot chocolate sound?”
“I don’t have any money,” Silas said.
12
Ashanti and I got off the bus at our stop and walked home.
“He never has any money,” she said.
“But his father pays child support.”
The Outlaws of Sherwood Street: Giving to the Poor Page 8
