Mom shook hands with Sheldon Gunn. “Jane Forester,” she said. “And there’s no puzzle. We… we were just out for a walk. This is my daughter, Robbie.”
“Um,” I said, forgetting to extend my hand, not doing a good job on the whole introduction thing in general, but I was distracted by what my mom had just said, since we weren’t just out for a walk.
“Hello there,” said Sheldon Gunn, giving me a smile.
“Um,” I said again. His smile vanished in a flash, and his eyes changed, too, like he’d stopped seeing me. How dumb could I be? I got mad at myself for being such a useless dweeb, and in my madness blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “What about Bread?”
“Bread?” said Sheldon Gunn.
“Just one of the former tenants, I believe,” said Andrew. “Not important. Nice running into you, Jane.”
“And you,” said my mom, turning to go and giving Pendleton’s leash a little tug.
Meanwhile Andrew was unrolling a big set of plans. “Now, what I wanted to show you, Sheldon, is this suggestion of the planners, that the parking garage could come all the way to here and replace this whole block, so that…” Sheldon Gunn bent his head to examine the plans, but I stopped being aware of what was happening out in the world, because inside my head the pressure was suddenly building, faster than ever before, all the stages speeding by—electric ball, vision, pain, fluttering heart—and the red-gold beam flashed out, aimed hip level at Sheldon Gunn’s side. Then something fell from under the folds of Gunn’s topcoat and landed on the sidewalk with a very soft thud. It took a strange long sideways bounce in my direction and landed at my feet. Without a thought, like a figure in a dream, maybe of the soaring kind, I stepped on whatever had fallen and then, after making sure that no one was looking, I picked it up and dropped it in my pocket. By now I knew what I had in there: a fat wad of bills, neatly packed as though they’d just come from the bank, Benjamin Franklin on top. And that without-a-thought part wasn’t quite true.
I glanced around. Andrew and Sheldon Gunn were examining the plans, their backs to me. Pendleton had gotten his leash twisted around a parking meter, and my mom was trying to free him. No one had seen a thing. As for the red-gold beam, I was starting to get used to its invisibility to everyone but me.
“Come on, Robbie,” Mom said. “Let’s get going.”
All the way home I could feel that wad in my pocket. Or was it just the muffin I was feeling? I wanted desperately to make sure, especially about the Benjamin Franklin part—oh, the imagination and how it plays tricks, from out of nowhere a big concept in my life—but I didn’t.
“Are you all right?” Mom said, glancing at me. “You look a little flushed.”
“I’m fine.” Oh, yeah? Getting used to the appearance of a red-gold beam visible only to yourself was fine? Comfortable with being—let’s face it—kind of a thief? Was I going crazy?
“And your voice sounds funny.”
“Funny how?”
“Like you’re upset about something.”
“Well, of course, Mom. Bread. Aren’t you upset, too?”
Mom nodded. She opened her mouth to say something, but then came a vibration on her phone and another text arrived.
When we got home there was a note from Dad on the fridge: “Gone trolling.” That was his expression for taking a long walk, hoping to hook some ideas. Mom started packing her briefcase for the office. I went upstairs.
Maybe I should describe my room. It’s small, just big enough for my bed, desk, and chest of drawers, but in the city you’re lucky to have a bedroom all to yourself. The walls are decorated with pictures of volcanoes: Vesuvius, St. Helen’s, Mauna Loa, Etna, Santorini, Nyiragongo (my favorite because I like the name). I did a project on volcanoes in fifth grade, and the pictures have been up there ever since. There’s also a window that looks out on the back of other buildings like ours and a tiny garden down below. Sometimes in warm weather I climb out and sit on the fire escape, actually a no-no from my parents’ point of view, but it’s perfectly safe. What else? Oh, yeah, Pookie’s tail hanging from the bedpost. I’d had a stuffed dog named Pookie until one day I was at school and Pendleton got hold of him.
I took off my jacket, emptied my pocket. Not my imagination: in my hand, covered with muffin crumbs, I held a thick wad of bills, Benjamin Franklin on top. I started counting. One, two, three, four, five—all of them Benjamins! I kept going—seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, Benjamins each and every one, my hands no longer steady. In the end I counted thirty-one. Thirty-one hundred dollars! Also, thirty-one was a number that had meaning in my life: it was on my basketball jersey. Okay, maybe not a lot of meaning—especially since the number I’d wanted was six, already worn by Ashanti—but some, and I took it as a good sign, encouragement for this plan that had been forming in my head the whole time.
First I had to re-count the money, just to make sure. One, two, three, four, five—
There was a knock on the door. Mom’s knock. I hadn’t even heard her footsteps. Did my hearing suck, too? Was I wandering the world with practically no senses at all? And had I been counting aloud?
“Robbie?”
The door opened. By that time I was sitting on the bed, bills and muffin underneath me. “Yeah?”
Mom looked in. She’d changed her jacket for her coat. “I’ll only be two or three hours,” she said. “Hopefully.”
“Okay.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Do?”
“While I’m gone. How about calling that Ashanti kid? Doesn’t she live close by?”
“I don’t really know her.”
“You could get to know her.”
“Mom. She’s in eighth grade. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”
“Sure?”
“Yeah. Uh, Mom?”
“Yes?”
“Who’s Andrew, exactly?”
“A senior partner.”
“What’s he like?”
“A shark.”
I laughed.
“The kind,” Mom went on, “that has to keep swimming or it drowns, so they’re always hungry.”
I stopped laughing.
Mom left. As soon as I heard the door close downstairs, I counted the money again. And once more. By that time I was forming opinions on what Ben Franklin must have been like, just from seeing his face so much. But that wasn’t the point. The point was I had in my hands $3,100. I cleaned up the remains of the muffin.
The house grew quiet, at least quiet for the city, meaning a constant noisy hum with no nearby sirens, shouting, sudden braking, garbage trucks, or low-flying airplanes. Real actual quiet, which I’d experienced at times, such as last summer when I spent two weeks at a camp in Vermont, bothered me. I got up, stuffed the money back in my jacket pocket, and started for the door. At that point, I got the idea of wearing my hoodie instead of the jacket, hard to say why. My hoodie—a heavy sweatshirt with a hand-warmer pocket and the Mets NY logo on the chest—hung in the closet. I opened it and heard the voice of Mitch the landlord rising from his apartment down below. This was a strange quirk of my closet, something to do with the pipes, my dad said. Sometimes I could even make out the words, like now, for instance: “A quarter point?” Mitch was saying, maybe on the phone. “Why would I bother?” Was he talking about money? A big difference between adults and kids occurred to me then: adults talked an awful lot about money, and kids did not.
But at the moment I was a kid with money on my mind. I put on my hoodie, transferred the $3,100 to the hand-warmer pocket, and went downstairs. Pendleton lay under the table, eyes open but not moving, in one of those trancelike states of his. There were all kinds of rules about going out by myself, such as never at night, only certain streets allowed, and having a good reason, which included meeting friends or shopping for a necessity we were out of, such as kibble; plus always calling Mom or Dad first, and failing that, leaving a note on the fridge. I left a note, right beside my dad’s: “Back in a f
lash.”
Not long after that, I was standing in front of the no-name hole-in-the-wall café again, looking across the street at Bread. It wasn’t a busy street for cars, and not many walkers were around either, maybe because the sky had turned cloudy and a cold wind had risen. The windows of Bread were dark, and I saw no sign of anyone inside. So things were going my way! Then I thought of something Ms. Kleinberg liked to say: You make your own luck. Suddenly I was in a great mood, like I could accomplish just about anything. I looked both ways and crossed the street, pulling on my hood at the same time. Why did I do that? I didn’t have anything bad in mind, quite the opposite.
The sign was still on the door at Bread: SORRY—CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. Someone had tagged the front window, a tag I’d never seen before that said vudu in thick purple letters. First tag I’d ever seen on Bread; even though I had nothing against tags, I couldn’t help thinking how fast things could fall apart. Graffiti showing up almost right away: what was next? Floods and fires, like one of those disaster movies about the city? But none of that changed my mood. Wasn’t I trying to keep things from falling apart? I walked right up to the door, a door with a slot for letters, and looked both ways again. A woman entering the café, a man hailing a cab, a couple hurrying toward the bus stop at the next corner, none of them watching me. I bent toward the door, took the wad of money from my hand-warming pocket, and—thinking too late that an envelope or even a rubber band might have been nice—shoved $3,100 inside. The bills landed with a faint fluttering sound.
I backed away, glanced around again—out of nowhere, someone was standing on the sidewalk, practically within touching distance! My heart started pounding in my chest so hard I thought I might rise straight up in the air. And then I saw the face of this person, a small person with a face not easy to see, on account of he, too, was wearing a hoodie.
Tut-Tut.
“Oh, my God,” I said. “You scared me to death.”
“S-s-s-s-,” said Tut-Tut. “S-s-s-s—”
We stood there. I saw that Tut-Tut had very nice eyes: the shape of them, the color, and this impression of depth. Also, he was shivering a bit, his lips ashy from cold. His hoodie was of the thin kind, and he wore flip-flops way past the season for flip-flops; his jeans were torn, but not in a cool way.
“Do you live near here?” I said. “Did I see you this morning?”
Tut-Tut didn’t answer. He went to the door, peered through the glass. I looked in, too. Dark inside, but not so dark you couldn’t see the money scattered on the floor. Had Tut-Tut caught me pushing it through the slot?
“Tut-Tut?” I said. He turned to me. “This is not what…” That feeble try ran out of gas. This is not what it looks like? Such as what? A robbery in reverse? Meanwhile Tut-Tut was staring at me with those eyes of his. “What?” I said. “What?”
“B-b-,” he said. “B-b-b-b—” He pointed through the glass. “M-m-,” he said. “M-m-m—”
“I know,” I said. “It’s kind of complicated. I don’t want you to—”
At that moment came a cry from across the street. “Hey! Is that my man Tut-Tut?”
I turned, saw three boys on skateboards, all bigger than me and Tut-Tut. They glided quickly over, clattered up onto the sidewalk.
“Hey, Tut-Tut, my man, wha’s up?” said the biggest. I recognized him from Joe Louis, a rough kid a year or two ahead of me, the kind of kid who scared the parents of kids like me into forking out all that money for private school. “Tell us a story, little man Tut-Tut.”
“Yeah,” said another. “Like how come you don’t have no green card.”
“I-I-,” said Tut-Tut, “I-I-I—”
“I-I-I-,” the rough kids said. “I-I-I-I-I-ay-ay-sombrero.” Then they circled around us on their boards, laughing and starting up on “G-g-g-g-green c-c-c-c-card,” and stuff like that.
I said, “Leave him alone.”
They all turned on me. “Who’s this geek?” said the biggest one.
“Why don’t you guys just move on?” I said, but don’t make the mistake of thinking I sounded tough: my voice was real shaky.
“Why don’t you guys just move on?” the big one said, mimicking me and making a limp-wristed move.
Then one of the others reached out and flicked my hoodie back off my face. “It’s one of those rich kids,” he said.
And the third one snatched my glasses and held them just out of reach. No glasses, so of course my vision got blurry.
“We’ll let you buy ’em back,” said the biggest one. “How much you got on you, rich kid?”
“I’m not a rich kid,” I said, pretty close to crying. “Give me my glasses.”
“Four-eyes rich kid wants her glasses,” said the kid who had them, tossing them in the air and almost not catching them.
“St-st-st-,” said Tut-Tut.
“St-st-st-st-st-,” went all three guys, spit flying from their mouths.
This was bad, and I had no idea how to keep it from getting worse, but then came some surprises. First, Tut-Tut stepped up, getting in between me and that biggest guy. Of course the biggest guy had no fear of Tut-Tut, grabbing him by the front of his hoodie.
“St-st-st-,” said Tut-Tut.
At that moment the whole electric ball thing sprang to life in my head, the pressure getting real intense, the pain very bad, but no force lines or whatever they were connecting to my eyes, although my vision got better at once. The biggest guy shoved Tut-Tut aside like nothing, and he would have fallen except that he bumped into me and I caught him. And as I held his skinny chest, I felt those force lines, not moving toward my eyes this time but down my arms like Tasers or something, so powerful, sparking hot off my fingertips and jolting Tut-Tut’s chest.
“Ow,” he cried out in pain; at the same time, my own pain was gone, utterly.
“What’s with you, you little wimp?” said the biggest guy. “I barely touched you.”
Tut-Tut straightened. He faced these mean kids. So brave! But he was going to get the crap beat out of him, and probably me, too. Then Tut-Tut opened his mouth, and I got the biggest shock of my life. Tut-Tut spoke, and he spoke in a strong, clear, commanding voice.
“Give back her glasses,” he said, no stuttering, no pausing, no struggle; he had a slight accent, kind of French. “And then,” he went on, “get out of here.”
Dead silence. The three rough kids all gazed at Tut-Tut, astonishment on their faces. The kid with my glasses handed them back to me, his movements slow, like he was hypnotized. Then he and the third kid backed away; only the big one stayed where he was. “You could talk all this time? You’re playing a big joke on everybody?”
Tut-Tut took a step toward him. He was much smaller than the big kid, but it didn’t seem that way. “I have a knife,” Tut-Tut said, in this new voice of his, “and I know how to use it.”
Zoom. All three of them bolted, not even taking their boards. We watched them till they rounded a corner and vanished from sight.
Tut-Tut turned to me.
“I’m scared,” he said. He started shaking.
“Why?” I said. But I was scared too. Maybe Tut-Tut knew the reason. I sure didn’t.
“Because I can talk,” he said. He shook more and more. “What’s going on? I’ve never talked in my whole life. Except inside my head, only now it’s getting outside, too.”
“Well,” I said, “that’s good.” Maybe my lamest remark ever.
“And when you caught me just now?”
“Yeah?”
“When your hands were on my chest?”
“Yeah?”
“I felt a jolt. It went right through my body.” Tears ran down his face.
“And then you could talk?”
“Yeah,” Tut-Tut said. More tears, and suddenly his face was shining. The shaking stopped and Tut-Tut raised his hands to the sky. “I can talk,” he cried. “I’d stopped thinking this could ever happen. I can talk! I’m talking!” He looked at me, his eyes so bright. “You know what’
s funny?” he said.
“What?”
“I don’t know what to say.”
He started laughing. I laughed, too. Then we were hugging. I could feel the bones of Tut-Tut’s spine and all the ribs under the skin of his back.
“I can talk,” he said. We let go of each other, stepped back a bit. “Listen to me,” Tut-Tut said. “I’m speaking English! Also I can speak Creole.” And he spoke something in a foreign language that sounded a little like French. He laughed again, then clasped his chest and spun in a circle. “I can ask questions,” he said.
That had to be amazing. “What’s the first one?” I said.
“What’s your name?” he said.
“Robbie. What’s yours?”
“Tut-Tut.”
“I mean your real name.”
“Toussaint.”
“Cool. I’ll call you Toussaint.”
He shook his head. “Tut-Tut’s better. It’s my nickname, my American nickname.” He glanced through the door, down onto the floor of Bread where the money lay. “So did I see what I thought I saw?” he said.
“I can explain,” I said. But could I? Where to begin? The basketball game, or cut right to Sheldon Gunn’s $3,100? And while I was trying to line things up in some sort of order, my vision, still in that hawklike phase that always accompanied these—fits? Was that the word? I shied away from it. But the point was my vision was deteriorating back to normal again, all the fine details of Tut-Tut’s face growing less fine. “Bread has to close up because they can’t make rent. Some money… fell into my hands, and—”
“Yeah?” he said. “Like how?”
“Well,” I said, my vision getting blurrier, “something really strange has been happening to me.” I put on my glasses.
“Yeah?” said Tut-Tut. “Like wha-wh-wh-wh-wh-w-w-w-w…”
“Tut-Tut?”
His eyes, his mouth, all opening wide: the look people get when they’re about to get mowed down or blown away by something terrible, like an earthquake or a hurricane. “I-,” he said. He tried so hard, on and on, veins popping out in his neck, his face swelling up. “I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-” But it was no good. Tut-Tut put his hands over his ears and screamed, a long unstuttering sound, but not speech.
Robbie Forester and the Outlaws of Sherwood Street Page 4
