“Because he gets involved with every cause that comes along, even at the cost of neglecting his own family?” Silas said.
“Yeah,” said Ashanti, “if you want to put it that way.”
Silas nodded. “Makes sense. Did he go for it?”
“He did,” I said.
“You left out the charm, of course.”
“Not exactly,” I said. And we told him about Dutch silver and his father’s research into trading beads.
“What does it mean?” Silas said. “Was the charm part of the twenty-four-dollar deal? Selling Manhattan, all that?”
I took off the charm, laid it on the desk. Did it look centuries old? Not that I could see. Nor did it look brand-new. Or in any way magical. But if Wilders was right, the homeless woman who had dropped it had been sitting in front of a once-sacred place.
“Suppose,” Ashanti said, “it was part of the deal. Did it have magic properties then, or did it get them as a result?”
“Huh?” said Silas.
“What didn’t you understand?” Ashanti said.
“Any of it. I didn’t get any of it. Zip, zilch, nada.”
“How can anyone be so smart and so dumb at the same time?” Ashanti said.
“The dumb part of me can’t tell you,” said Silas.
Ashanti blinked a long slow blink, a danger sign. She turned to me. “Do you see what I’m talking about?”
“Uh,” I said, “some kind of balancing thing? Making the trade for Manhattan actually more even?”
“Kind of,” Ashanti said. “After the fact. More even. More just.”
I kind of hoped that the charm might—not hear us, of course, but in some way react, show a little solidarity. But the charm simply lay there, looking like nothing much. Suddenly it hit me that the wrong person was wearing it. The right person was an orphan, an escaped prisoner, a survivor of a horrible disaster at sea, not someone like me. I’d had a cushy life so far, although when you went to school with kids like Signe Stone, Flagler on her mother’s side—cushiest of the cushy—it could slip your mind that you were pretty lucky too.
“Tut-Tut should be the one who wears the charm,” I said.
“Nope,” they both said at once.
“It chose you,” Ashanti said.
“Twice,” Silas added. “Homeless woman first and oyster second. And anyway, Tut-Tut’s a guy. Guys don’t wear jewelry.”
“Guys wear jewelry all the time,” I said.
“Not guys like me and Tut-Tut,” Silas said. “Guys who do guy things.”
“Such as?” Ashanti said.
Silas dug through a bunch of inner pockets in his Michelin-Man jacket, dumped stuff on the desk: coils of wire, batteries, electronic components I didn’t know the names for, balled-up gum wrappers, a small flashlight, cigarette filter tips.
“Whoa,” I said. “You’re smoking?”
“Of course not,” said Silas. “Checked the stats? These are for an experiment.”
“What experiment?” Ashanti said.
“Never mind. It didn’t work out.” He did some more rummaging. “Here we go.” He laid a sort of card on the desk, a small complicated-looking card with blues and greens merging into each other, lots of different-sized writing; and Tut-Tut’s picture. “Ta-da,” Silas said. “Guy thing extraordinaire.”
“What’s this?” said Ashanti.
But I knew: Uncle Jean-Claude had one just like it. “A green card,” I said.
“Meaning Tut-Tut’s legal?” Ashanti said.
“We just have to put this in his hands,” said Silas.
“Where did you get it?” I said.
“Get it?” said Silas. “I made it, of course, and it wasn’t easy. You’re looking at state-of-the-art personal identification, brothers and sisters.”
“You made it?” I said. “How?”
“I could explain, but you wouldn’t understand.”
“But it’s not real,” Ashanti said.
“Depends on your definition,” Silas told her.
“And even if we get it to him, what then?” she went on.
“I can’t do all the thinking,” Silas said.
We ate muffins. I hung the charm back around my neck. It felt heavy, like it was dragging me down.
“Ahm indereted in dis bring,” Silas said.
“No one ever told you not to talk with your mouth full?” Ashanti said.
Silas finished chewing. “I’m interested in this spring.”
• • •
We hung out across the street from the Gunn Tower construction site. There were no demonstrators around, just normal traffic and some pedestrians, all of them walking quickly, their clothes flapping in the cold wind and everybody looking miserable, like a raggedy army coming and going. The scaffolding in front of the construction site seemed higher than before, and a huge yellow crane now rose over the plywood walls.
“Crane’s not moving,” Silas said. “Ergo—”
“We told you,” Ashanti said. “No more ergos.”
“They’re not working today.”
“Good,” I said. “Perfect time to scope things out.” Then, like a well-trained, careful kid, I looked both ways before stepping off the curb, and as I did, caught sight of something in a store window that stopped me right there.
It was one of those electronics stores where everything’s always loud and aggressive inside. In the window hung a big TV monitor, and on the screen, with the museum as a backdrop, Dina DeNunzio was interviewing Jim Wilders. Jim? That reporter’s here. Was there a law that I had to be so slow on the uptake?
“Hey!” I said. Everyone looked. We moved almost like one person toward the window. Sound came faintly through the glass.
“But,” Dina was saying, “a three-judge panel has ruled that you failed to present convincing evidence of Native American occupation on the site.”
“That’s their problem,” Wilders said.
“Care to explain what you mean by that?” Dina asked.
“Their minds were made up from the get-go.”
“Are you questioning the integrity of the judges?”
Wilders looked at Dina with irritation. Then he put his hand on the microphone grip, pulled it closer to him. Dina tried to pull it back. Mr. Wilders stared right into the camera, glared at the whole world. “This is only the beginning of a long, long fight. This city, this country, this planet—they have value far beyond the dollars and cents so beloved by Sheldon Gunn, the mayor, and all their kind.” He raised a fist. “Justice!”
Dina, now pretty irritated herself, took back the microphone with a jerk. “Live from Brooklyn, Dina DeNunzio. Back to you, Clint.”
A blow-dried silvery-haired guy appeared on the screen, looked like he was searching for something funny to say.
“Is he a bit crazy?” Ashanti said.
“The studio dude?” said Silas. “They’re all like that.”
“I’m talking about your father,” said Ashanti. Her eyes narrowed. “And I thought you didn’t even have a TV.”
“You’ve caught me in a seeming inaccuracy,” Silas said.
They bickered some more, like one of those old married sitcom couples. I wasn’t really paying attention. Instead I was trying to imagine what this part of Brooklyn looked like back in the times Wilders was studying. Now it was big city to the max, with hardly a tree in sight and no grass whatsoever. A stream had come bubbling out of the ground right across the street from us? It was hard to picture.
The light turned green. “Let’s go,” I said. We crossed the street, cut through a bunch of pedestrians, all of them on phones, talking and texting and not even seeing us, and followed the plywood scaffolding wall on the other side until we came to some holes cut in it for people to see. I stood on my tiptoes and peered through one, seeing a huge pit, much
wider than I’d expected, roughly the size and shape of a football field, maybe bigger, and also much deeper. The base of the crane was way, way down there, set deep in the mud. At first nothing moved at all. Then, from out of the sky, a seagull, pure white and very big, came circling down. It swept low over the mud, snatched up a scrap of paper, maybe a fast food wrapper, flapped its wings, and flew away. I remembered seagulls—including a real big one like this—on our wild night at sea, the night I’d lost the charm, and wouldn’t have been surprised if the charm had now started heating up or given some other signal. No signal came. Despite that, I made a sort of mental leap on my own. “Suppose we go down there,” I said.
“What for?” Silas said. “There’s no sign of a spring—I’ve seen enough.”
“I haven’t,” said Ashanti.
“Two to one,” I said.
“So what?” said Silas. “Everybody thought the charge of the light brigade was a good idea, too—until it happened.”
I wasn’t sure what the charge of the light brigade was, didn’t want to get into it. No need to. Ashanti had already moved off, was following the plywood wall. We followed her—Silas in the rear, humming some sort of tune, possibly the kind played for cavalry charges. We came to the next block, turned the corner. This street wasn’t as busy. Up ahead, Ashanti had stopped and was bent down, examining where the scaffolding wall met the sidewalk pavement. Was the plywood a little cracked, like maybe something had banged into it? She glanced around. No one to see but us outlaws. She gave the base of the wall a quick, hard kick, knocking out a piece of plywood in one try.
Silas and I approached the opening. Not a big opening, but just enough room for three kids to squeeze through one at a time.
“No way,” Silas said. “I’ll never fit.”
“You’ll have to take off that stupid jacket,” Ashanti said.
“I’ll freeze to death.”
“We’ll pass it through, for God’s sake!” Ashanti said. “You can put it on when we’re inside!”
“Sounds iffy,” Silas said.
15
I checked up and down the street. It was one of those city street moments, always brief, when no one was in sight.
“Quick,” I said.
Ashanti got down and squirmed through the hole in a flash.
“Silas?”
He unzipped his jacket, started taking it off, got all tangled up, and suddenly the contents of his pockets came spilling out: the coils of wire, batteries, electronic components, balled-up gum wrappers, flashlight, cigarette filter tips, plus lots of other miscellaneous stuff I didn’t bother to catalog.
“You’re completely unbelievable,” I said, kneeling down, scooping up everything, stuffing it all back in the Michelin-Man jacket.
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Silas said, making no move to help.
I rolled up the jacket, stuffed it through the hole.
“Hey!” Silas said as his jacket disappeared from view.
“Go!”
He got down, crawled through the hole on all fours, groaning and grumbling. I took one last backward glance, saw a long black car nosing around the corner, darted through the hole.
On the other side, Ashanti was already making her way down the steep earthen slope, switchbacking in long descending diagonals, looking surprisingly small. Silas planted his feet. “No way.”
“Come on,” I said, tossing him the jacket. “It’ll be like snowboarding.”
“Which I’ve never had the slightest desire to do.” Silas zipped up his jacket to the very top. Outside, I heard a car purring by, very slow.
“I bet you have a great sense of balance,” I said.
“How much?”
I grabbed his hand and tugged him toward the edge of the slope.
“Five bucks?” he said
“All right.”
“Might as well pay me now.”
We made our way down. The earth was kind of frozen mud, with big rocks sticking out here and there. Silas slipped right away. I caught him before he fell.
“Fork it over,” he said, or something like that: hard to tell through all his huffing and puffing. He went rigid, like he wouldn’t take one more step. Then his eyes shifted. He stared at the dug-out sides of the slope. I noticed it was layered like a cake, with thick bands, some almost black, some reddish, some shot through with yellow.
“Interesting,” Silas said, and slowly started down, examining the layers as he went, paying no attention to his actual movements, yet not slipping once. At one point, he even leaned out over a rock, scraped up a bit of red-yellow dirt, and tasted it. When we got to the bottom, I held out my hand.
“I’ll settle up next time I get my allowance,” he said.
“Your mother doesn’t give you an allowance.”
“Maybe that will change.”
We caught up with Ashanti, walked across the bottom of the pit, around the crane and toward the other side. The mud wasn’t as frozen at the bottom, glistening here and there in a slippery sort of way, a very darkish sort of mud—I’d never seen mud quite like it. We reached the far side of the pit and stopped.
“What are we looking for?” Ashanti said.
“Bones would be good,” said Silas.
I hadn’t thought of it so bluntly, but yes, bones were on the list of things that would help prove that Wilders was right. Beads or spear points would have been my preference, but they weren’t around either. All there was to see was mud.
“What if we dug deeper?” I said.
“Look how far they’ve dug already,” Ashanti pointed out.
We all raised our eyes to the sky. From where we were, it seemed kind of small—a weird thing to think about the sky—and the distance back to the surface looked huge. I got hit by whatever the opposite of the fear of heights was—fear of depths, I guess—and had to keep myself from scrambling up the slope in panic. A strange quiet swept over us.
“Getting buried alive would suck,” Silas said. “The earth would cover your eyes and fill up your nose and mouth, and you wouldn’t be able to move a muscle, but you’d still be alive for a minute or two.”
“Zip it,” Ashanti said.
“Also,” Silas went on, as though she hadn’t spoken, “see that huge rock up there?” We gazed up at a boulder half sticking out of the mud wall high overhead. “Probably brought here by glaciers in the last ice age, but that’s not the point. The point is that with all this rain, an unstable sort of—”
What was this? The boulder was starting to wobble?
“Silas? Are you doing this?”
“Me? How?”
Good question. We seemed to be out of magic at the moment. The charm lay cold against my skin. Meanwhile the boulder wobbled some more, and then with a deep sucking sound, it popped loose and started bounding down. Thud thud thud—it bounced against the slope in long curves, rolling massively through the air, straight at us.
“Run!” I shouted. But there was no time. The rock came hurtling right toward us, appearing to grow in size until there was nothing else to see. Then, at the last instant, it struck the edge of a sort of shelf jutting from the slope, and flew right over our heads, before landing on the floor of the pit with an enormous, mud-splashing boom. It bounced one last time and came to rest. And there, just feet from us, where the mud had gotten splashed away, was a shallow depression in the floor of the pit, maybe a foot deep.
“My jacket’s all muddy,” Silas said.
I knelt down for a closer look at this depression. At the bottom I saw a freshly exposed small wooden square with a wooden ring at one end, everything crusted with mud. I reached down and started scraping the mud away. And as I did, a carved face came into view, a face very similar to the one in Professor Wilders’s glass case.
“That ring,” Ashanti said. “Could it be a handle?”
“Maybe.”
“Making this a trapdoor?”
“I don’t know.”
“Only one way to find out,” Ashanti said.
“Personally,” said Silas, “I’m not desperate to know. Plus it’s getting cold, and I’ve got to clean off this mud before my mom—”
Ashanti gave him a look, and he went silent, although it was a snap to imagine him going on about his mom, his jacket, Thaddeus’s rehab, chunky peanut butter, redshift, and the age of the universe. I knelt, got a grip on the wooden ring, and pulled.
Yes, a trapdoor, although it wasn’t hinged to anything. The whole wooden square came free, revealing a hole in the ground maybe six feet deep. On three sides, the hole was surrounded by earth, but the fourth seemed to be open. I felt the upward flow of warm, moist air on my face.
“A tunnel?” I said.
“Only one way to find out,” Ashanti said.
“Stop saying that,” Silas said. “Why rush into anything? What if someone sees us?”
We scanned the walls of the pit, the unmanned crane, the scaffolding rising high over street level. No human being in sight.
“And if it is a tunnel,” Silas pressed on, “it’ll be dark. How are we going to see anything?”
“With the aid of your trusty flashlight,” Ashanti said.
“What if I don’t have it on me?” said Silas.
“Then you wouldn’t be you.” Ashanti held out her hand. Silas gave her the flashlight. She switched it on, shone the light into the hole. The floor was hard-packed dirt. She swept the beam back and forth, then stopped. There, in the circle of light, was a footprint; just one single print of a bare foot, toes pointed toward the tunnel, if in fact it was a tunnel.
“You think someone’s down there?” Ashanti said.
“No way,” said Silas. “This has all been buried for ages.”
“Meaning that’s a footprint from long ago?” said Ashanti.
“Logical conclusion,” Silas said.
“What else have you figured out?” I said.
“Nothing definitive.”
“Share.”
“Too soon,” Silas said. “And sharing’s not my reset position.”
The Outlaws of Sherwood Street: Giving to the Poor Page 11
