Robbie Forester and the Outlaws of Sherwood Street

by Peter Abrahams

  “And your parents?” I said.

  Ashanti looked down her beautiful nose at me. She didn’t answer the question, instead saying, “Ms. Kleinberg talked about you at practice today.”

  “Yeah?” And suddenly I knew what was coming: Ms. Kleinberg was kicking me off the team.

  “She said you were a heady player.”

  Heady? Me? Ashanti had to be putting me on, right? But there was no sign of that on her face.

  “Weird.”

  “What’s weird?”

  “What you just said. Me being heady.”

  “I didn’t say it. Ms. Kleinberg did.”

  Meaning what? Ashanti didn’t think I was heady, maybe even thought the opposite? Intimidating and prickly: my very first impression of Ashanti, and nothing had changed. But now I was getting a bit prickly myself.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I got that.”

  We gazed at each other, not in a particularly friendly way. A vague idea about my current lack of friends maybe having something to do with my own behavior stirred in my mind and quickly sank from sight.

  “How about a snack?” I said.

  “Got to split.” But Ashanti didn’t move, and after a second or two, said, “Like what kind of snack?”

  I rose and opened the fridge. “There’s leftover Thai,” I said.

  “From Your Thai?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not kaeng phet ped yang, by any chance?”

  “This is your lucky day,” I said.

  Ashanti smiled. I’d never seen her smile before—and, come to think of it, never seen her look happy. In photos of me I’ve always got a goofy smile on my face.

  I took chopsticks from the drawer, and we ate right out of the carton, taking turns on the dipping-in part.

  “It’s even better cold,” Ashanti said.

  “Way better.”

  “Mr. Nok’s a funny guy.”

  “The owner?”

  “He learned English from Mel Gibson movies. He memorized whole chunks. You should hear him do that speech where Mel is firing up the dudes in the kilts before the battle.”

  I laughed.

  “Too bad about what’s happening to him.”

  “Mel Gibson?”

  Now Ashanti laughed, too. Her smile was great—made sense of that expression about the kind of smile that lit up a room—but her laugh was harsh and raspy. For some reason I started laughing again, spewing little bits of Thai, which made Ashanti laugh harder. After thirty seconds or so, we calmed down; I sensed that things were different between us now, but couldn’t have said in what way.

  “Not Mel Gibson,” Ashanti said, poking around in the bottom of the carton with her chopsticks. “I’m talking about Mr. Nok. He’s closing down.”

  “Closing the restaurant?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Moving it to a bigger place?”

  “Nope. He’s fed up—talks about going back to Thailand.”

  “Oh, my God. Fed up about what?”

  “Too much naked greed. That’s what he told my dad, anyway.” Her eyes took on a brief inward look. “My dad’s fed up about the same thing.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. Were the customers greedy, maybe not willing to pay enough for such great food?

  “A new landlord came in and jacked the rent way up.”

  “Whoa,” I said, struck by an obvious thought.

  “Whoa what?”

  “This landlord—is his name Sheldon Gunn?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Or maybe the Brooklyn something or other redevelopment project?”

  Ashanti shrugged.

  All of a sudden, I felt the silver heart warming up against my skin. “Feel this,” I said. “The heart.”

  Ashanti looked at it through narrowed eyes and then reached out. She had long, slender fingers, the nails painted sky blue. “Hey—it’s hot.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re sure it’s got no battery? Maybe some real tiny one?”

  “I’m not actually sure.”

  Ashanti picked up the bracelet, turned it this way and that, checked both sides of the heart. “It’s cooling down.”

  “Yeah?”

  “And there’s no sign of a battery.” She hefted the heart on her fingertip. “Gotta be platinum,” she said. “Heavier than silver and way more expensive—number seventy-eight on the periodic table.”

  “Wow. How do you know that?”

  “We had a test on the periodic table last week.”

  “Thatcha,” I said.

  “Comin’ atcha,” said Ashanti.

  Thatcha comin’ atcha was a Thatcher thing I’d seen in the halls from time to time but never been part of.

  “Platinum, huh?” I said, and reached across the table to touch it. I felt a sudden strangeness in my hand, like a dull throbbing, and froze an inch away.

  “Hey!” said Ashanti.

  “What?” I said.

  “I’ve got this strange feeling in my hand.”

  “A dull throbbing?”

  “Yeah,” Ashanti said. “Kind of like it’s building to another shock.”

  “Me too,” I said. Our hands, so close to each other, looked perfectly normal, revealing nothing of what was going on inside. I withdrew my hand. The dull throbbing faded and vanished.

  “Gone,” said Ashanti. “What’s going on?”

  “Put the bracelet on the table,” I said.

  Ashanti set it down. I reached out again, very slowly, and took Ashanti’s hand: no throbbing, no shock, nothing. She gazed at the bracelet. “It’s got some kind of…” She couldn’t come up with the word.

  Neither could I. But at that moment I was hit by another of those realizations. “Whatever it is,” I said, “you’re part of it.”

  “Can you be more specific?” Ashanti said, back to her intimidating ways. “For once?”

  For once? Like we were old friends. “Remember that foul?” I said.

  “The one that chinless creep didn’t call?”

  “Exactly. The thing is…” and I launched into the whole story. The homeless woman and her death, the bracelet, the electric ball, the currents to my eyes, the red-gold beam, the $3,100 and what I did with it, the headaches, the fever, the MRI—everything. I made a complete mess of it, getting events out of order, making no sense. When I finally shut up, Ashanti was gazing at me, eyes wide, mouth slightly open.

  “You don’t believe me,” I said.

  Ashanti didn’t answer. Instead she picked up the bracelet. Then, slowly, she reached out with her other hand and took my hand in hers. Kapow! Right away I got zapped by a shock, and so did Ashanti—I could tell from her face. I tried to snatch my hand away, but she didn’t let go; her grip was powerful, much stronger than mine.

  “Hey!” I said. “What are you doing?” The shock went on and on, pulsing up and down my body.

  “Shut up,” said Ashanti. And all at once, the pulsing subsided, right down to nothing. Ashanti squinted toward the wall. “I don’t see it,” she said. “Do you?”

  “See what?” My hand was all sweaty; so was hers.

  “The beam, for God’s sake,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “No beam.”

  “And I didn’t feel the electric ball thing.”

  “Me neither.”

  Ashanti let go of me. “We only got a partial,” she said.

  “A partial?”

  “Something’s missing.” Ashanti’s eyes shifted, like she was having a thought. “How about we go visit Mr. Nok?” she said.

  “There’s another carton in the fridge—green curry.”

  “It’s not about that.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “I’ve got an idea.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Try.”

  She shook her head. “Let’s just do it.”

  Why not, whatever it was? “Thatcha,” I said.

  “Comin’ atcha.�
�

  Fist bump. And since Ashanti still had the bracelet in her other hand, that meant—

  “Ow!”

  I left a note on the fridge: Gone to Your Thai w/Ashanti (friend from T). Back soon.

  We went down to the street. Night was falling and the rain had stopped, leaving the pavement slick and shiny and streaked with streetlamp reflections, an effect I was more familiar with from movies than from real life. We walked back up the hill and turned onto the street with the halfway house. Maybe it wasn’t very nice in there, because guys from the halfway house were always out on the stoop, even in bad weather. This was the halfway house for guys with mental problems. I preferred going by the other halfway house in our neighborhood, the one for inmates on probation, and was glad Ashanti was with me. There were two guys on the stoop, one nodding off, the other reading the Bible—I could tell from the gold edging on the pages. Without even a glance at us, he said, “Roll away the stone, sisters, roll away the stone,” as we passed.

  We walked in silence for a few yards, and then Ashanti said, “Ever wonder how they get like that?”

  “Not really.”

  “You’re smart.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Because trying to figure it out’s a waste of time,” Ashanti said. “No one knows.”

  I glanced at her. Ashanti’s face was hard and unhappy. “Is this… um, mental illness stuff another thing you take in eighth grade?”

  She shook her head.

  Dumb question on my part, which I should have known from the get-go: “No one knows” was not a Thatcher-type answer.

  Your Thai was on the next block, one of those places slightly below street level, so that all you saw through the window were the below-the-knees parts of the people going by. The kitchen was behind a counter at the back; there were a few tables in front, with only one customer, bent over a steaming bowl. Mr. Nok was chopping a bright-orange pepper and talking on a cell phone at the same time, the phone wedged between his shoulder and ear. He was a very little guy and always wore one of those tall white chef’s hats, which should have made him look ridiculous but somehow did not.

  “What form? What form?” he was saying. “I fill out all form. All form, many, many time.” He sounded agitated and his face looked agitated, his forehead knotted up, but his hands seemed calm, if you could say that about hands, calmly and neatly chopping up the pepper in quick, even strokes. His voice rose. “No attachment! Fax!” He clicked off, swept the peppers into a bowl, turned to us.

  He blinked, then smiled, a strange smile, what with his forehead still being so tense.

  “Hi, Mr. Nok,” said Ashanti.

  “Hello, Ashanti.” He glanced at me. “And you, young lady always for the kaeng phet ped yang.” For a second or two, I didn’t get what he was talking about; Mr. Nok’s pronunciation of the dish was a lot different from mine.

  “Yeah, it’s awesome,” I said. “I’m Robbie. Is it true you’re moving or something?”

  His smile vanished. Mr. Nok had one of those unlined faces that made it hard to see his true age, but now he looked pretty ancient. “They close me down,” he said. “No more kaeng phet ped yang.” He turned to Ashanti. “No more Mel Gibson.”

  “Why—” I began, but at that moment a fax machine at the end of the counter whirred into action. Papers began shooting into a tray—and spilling out, since the tray was full, and fluttering to the floor at my feet. I bent down, picked them up, and placed them on the counter, but not so quickly that I missed the letterhead on the top sheet—Jaggers and Tulkinghorn—hey! Mom’s firm! Before I could read any more, Mr. Nok reached over and grabbed the sheet of paper. He scanned it, wincing like he’d felt a sudden pain inside. Then he laid it down behind the bowl of peppers and out of my view.

  “But, Mr. Nok,” Ashanti was saying, “what about somewhere else? There must be other places you could rent.”

  Mr. Nok shook his head. “Here is perfection,” he said, looking around the small space, low-ceilinged, not well lit, smoky-smelling, and even a bit dirty, to tell the truth. “This is my dream, my American dream.” His eyes welled up, and two tears rolled down Mr. Nok’s smooth face, leaving glistening tracks.

  I leaned close to Ashanti and spoke in her ear. “Can you read that letter?” I said. She rose on her tiptoes, trying to see over the bowl of peppers, then shook her head. “It might be important,” I said.

  At that moment, Ashanti did something I didn’t expect at all. Her eyes on Mr. Nok’s unhappy face, she grabbed me hard by the wrist—the bracelet wrist. The shock followed at once, and this time it brought the power, although the electric ball came and went in seconds, and so did the blurring of my vision. I got the feeling, rare for me, that I knew exactly what was coming next. All the power, the power in the bracelet, or in me, or both, was about to pass into Ashanti, and this time the red-gold beam would shine from her eyes.

  But that was not what happened. Oh, maybe the power-passing-from-me-to-her part was right, because I felt a slight weakness in my knees, but no red-gold beam shone from Ashanti’s eyes. Instead she suddenly… grew? Was that it? Not wider or bulkier, just taller, by about six inches or so. I glanced down and saw that her feet were off the floor. She was hovering in the air, with no visible means of support. And the expression on her face, that face so seldom smiling—I’ll never forget it: astonishment blossoming into joy. Mr. Nok, wiping his damp cheeks on the back of his sleeve and reaching for another bright-orange pepper, didn’t seem to notice. Ashanti rose a little higher, without the slightest effort, and peered over the bowl at the letter. The hovering went on for maybe another ten seconds or so, and then she settled slowly back to the floor—down to earth, was what I actually thought at the time—and landed softly.

  We looked at each other. “Did you see that?” Ashanti said, so quietly it was more like mouthing the words.

  “Wow,” I said, also quietly. Wow didn’t seem like a good enough word for the occasion, but nothing else came to mind.

  Mr. Nok’s cell phone rang, and he moved down the counter to talk.

  “Let’s go,” said Ashanti.

  We headed toward the door. The lone customer was watching us. Was there suspicion in his eyes? I thought so, but some adults always looked at kids that way.

  Out on the street, I said, “You… you levitated.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did it feel like?”

  “Totally sick,” Ashanti said. “Is that your mom’s firm, Tulkinghorn and Jaggers?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who’s Egil Borg?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “He’s the one who signed the letter. It says that because Mr. Nok hasn’t paid the New Brooklyn Redevelopment Project, they’re suing him for treble damages.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Something bad.”

  We started walking home.

  “How come you wanted to see Mr. Nok?” I said. “Did you know what would happen?”

  “No way,” Ashanti said.

  “You said you had an idea.”

  “More like an urge,” Ashanti said. “I just had to. There was this pressure building in my head, building and building, and I thought the red-gold beam would happen, but it didn’t.”

  “So you believed me about that? The beam and all?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No doubts?”

  “Nope.”

  “But why?” I said. “It’s actually not so easy to believe. I’m still having trouble myself.”

  Ashanti flicked my shoulder with the back of her hand. “Hey! What’s wrong with you? Trying to get me to doubt you? A little too late, don’t you think, now that I’ve got this hovercraft thing going?”

  I laughed. So did Ashanti. She gave my shoulder another one of those backhand flicks.

  “Any pressure now?” I asked. “Inside your head, I mean.”

  “I know what you mean,” Ashanti said. “And the answer’s no. The moment I rose up it wa
s all gone, pffft, just like that.”

  “Do you think you could do it again?”

  Ashanti closed her eyes, took a deep breath. A moment passed. “No,” she said. Her eyes opened. They turned yellow in the headlights of a taxi passing by, then went back to normal, an effect I’d probably seen many times at night, but now inspired a new thought, probably crazy: there’s magic in the world. “What about you?” Ashanti said. “Can you make the beam happen?”

  “No.”

  “Try.”

  I tried my best, if trying my best meant squeezing my eyes shut, scrunching up my face, and praying for a headache. No electric ball, no currents, no beam, no change of any kind. I shook my head.

  “What if we both touch the heart?” Ashanti said.

  “We’ll get a shock.”

  “So what?”

  We both touched the heart. Surprise: no shock. Also no beam, no levitation.

  “Something extra has to be in the mix,” Ashanti said. “Some outside thing makes it happen.”

  “The New Brooklyn Redevelopment Project?” I said. But that couldn’t be right: the New Brooklyn Redevelopment Project had nothing to do with the foul on the basketball court. And what about Tut-Tut? How could there be any connection between those skateboarders and Sheldon Gunn? What did all those events or situations or whatever they were have in common? I didn’t know.

  “Poor Mr. Nok,” Ashanti said. “Comes all this way for his dream, cooks the greatest food in town, and then gets kicked onto the street. There’s no justice.”

  “Whoa! Say that again.”

  “About Mr. Nok and the American dream and—”

  “No. The last part.”

  “There’s no justice?”

  “Exactly.” I was getting excited. “That’s the outside thing, what makes the magic happen!”

  “Magic?”

  “Or whatever this is. Maybe not magic, but something special.” And didn’t it have to be special, because of all the injustice around? I suddenly felt the weight of the injustice, as if the whole huge city and all its buildings were pressing down.

  “Injustice is the outside thing?” Ashanti said.

  “Any other explanation?” I said.