Sherwood Nation: a novel

by Benjamin Parzybok

  He sipped the tea and scratched at his beard with his pipe. There was no possible way he would be allowed to coexist with a power that bound all the neighborhoods together. Already her organization was many times the size of his, sprawling and absorbing.

  Gregor watched as a bicyclist rounded the block at the corner and shot toward him. It was Jamal, riding at breakneck speed, as always. Jamal picked up the bike and leapt up the steps.

  “Pop,” he said and grinned. Jamal grabbed a rocker beside his father after he’d leaned his bike against the wall. He panted from the ride.

  “Hey boy,” Gregor said fondly. He’d enjoyed watching Jamal change over the course of the drought. He’d transformed from a softer, bookish early twenties to a ropey confidence over the last few years, so that Gregor, though he was loath to admit it to Jamal, would trust him with most anything. “News?”

  Jamal shrugged and took a pull off his canteen. Gregor motioned for his man on the porch to bring another tea but Jamal stood and said he’d fix his own.

  When he returned he’d regained his breathing and sat on a wooden chair with his small cup. “They’re making an army.”

  Gregor eyed him. “You mean, you’re making an army.” That Jamal had fallen in with her organization so deeply was a troublesome bit. The trap she’d built for him was complex indeed.

  “Yeah.” Jamal gave him an elusive smile.

  “Anybody we know?”

  “A few familiar faces, but nobody that big yet.”

  “You. They’ve got you.”

  “Yes,” Jamal said. “They have me.”

  Jamal turned and Gregor felt the boy search his face, his two steely drill-bit eyes aimed deep into his cerebrum. He could see what the look meant. Jamal had chosen a new leader and didn’t know how dangerous it was for their relationship. He could see how the boy was hooked, how he’d always been a dreamer and an idealist, that he’d done the family business only because he’d been born into it. Because there was the shared loss of the other half of their family, mother and brother, that kept the remaining father and son inseparable.

  “Come on, Pop.” Jamal turned away and watched the street. “Everything’s changing, man.”

  Jamal sipped his tea and watched a couple of guys push a burdened shopping cart with a stuck wheel down the street. Their bodies bent at severe angles behind in order to push. They knew better than to come calling at Gregor’s house. “They’re talking about things like farms and schools.”

  “Farms,” Gregor said and smiled, the word felt like some relic from the past and flooded him with nostalgia. They hadn’t dared leave the city for more than a year, but there were no more farms out there. No fields of apple trees, no vineyards, no peaches. He’d taken Jamal and his brother to the U-Pick strawberry farms when they were children. The whole memory floated intact and unreal in him as if a dream. He’d been high, of course, but still it was one of the few times in his memory he was proud of his parenting. They’d settled into a sort of comfortable rhythm for an afternoon, the three of them on their knees eating strawberries straight off the bushes, not bothering to save any to their baskets, their hands covered in juice, the berries giving them a prolonged closeness. Last he remembered, there’d been a series of water rights uprisings as farms died. A lot of blood was spilled. “And the city?”

  “They tried one raid before I got there. Nothing else. They either don’t know or feel like it’s too risky with the status she’s built. Her people disappear her when they need to.”

  “Hm,” Gregor said.

  “It means a lot to me, Pop.”

  A Hispanic boy of eleven or twelve approached and Gregor’s guard intercepted him.

  “I’m here for Pedro,” he squealed, as the guard blocked his way.

  “Where’s Pedro?” Gregor said.

  “Pedro’s dead,” the boy said.

  “Let him by,” Gregor said. “Explain your story quickly, boy.”

  Jamal closed his eyes and sank into his chair and felt sick of the whole thing. Every last needy fucking user, the rampant stupidity of the entire network. It was a different kind of power that Maid Marian wielded, and he found himself pulled toward it, his thoughts like iron filings toward a magnet.

  After the boy had left they were quiet. Jamal hadn’t heard every word but could sense his father’s anger. Something about an altercation between Pedro, a runner, and a user, and then Pedro’s son showing up to support the family in his stead. Depressing, but a gratingly boring story for its redundancy. Each of these incidents riled Gregor—he liked smoothly functioning machinery, a system at peace with itself—but to Jamal, it was the same inevitable incident occurring over and over.

  “Pop?”

  “Don’t. I know what you’re going to say,” Gregor said. The problem with Jamal, Gregor thought, is that he believes things really change. He believes that it really is an end-time, an end-time that allows for the reinvention of everything. A whirl of dust and debris blew down the street in front of them. And so: Was it? Would his inability to see that change break him in the end?

  He pondered bringing up the water truck heist, about which they’d fought virulently. The boy was going to get himself killed, and that was one reason to ponder things. Somehow they’d pulled it off, despite a half-baked plan. She was wealthy now.

  “It’s time to decide,” Jamal said.

  “No, not yet.”

  “Shit or get off the pot.”

  “There’s time still.”

  Jamal finished his tea and leaned his head back against the house. “No,” he said firmly. “There’s no more time.”

  Renee sat on the floor of her room with Bea across from her. They’d found a cribbage board and cards and had been dealing games since. It felt good to have the distraction, and they played in a giddy, amped manner, calling out their wins and smack-talking each other.

  Bea looked good to her, sitting cross-legged with a fan of cards on her knee. She was backlit and her hair shown a golden-red on her head, the freckles across her face like a paint-spraying of summer.

  In here, they were safe, and the world she’d spun into motion moved outside the door without her.

  “Fifteen for two, fifteen for six, and a pair makes eight, sucker,” Bea said.

  Renee dealt out the cards and thought about going to the tower to talk to Zach. She needed someone with whom she could strategize. There were those who trusted what you did, and those who followed blindly, and those who made suggestions, but with Josh gone she didn’t feel like she had anyone scheming on the same level, arguing and contradicting her. Could Gregor? she wondered. She had made a fool of herself in front of him, she thought, she had over-extended and squandered the opportunity for a genuine ally. She reached into her pocket and fingered the green laser there.

  “You put down the crib?”

  “Sorry?” Renee said.

  “Dude.”

  There was a knock at the door and they stared at each other for a brief moment before Renee yelled come in. It was Jamal. Renee invited him to come sit with them.

  “Cribbage,” he said.

  “You should take my spot,” Renee said.

  “She’s thinking about your dad,” Bea said.

  Jamal nodded. He opened and closed the palm that held his list of things-to-do, permanent-markered there in black. At the top was: Pop.

  “Chances?” Renee said.

  Jamal shrugged. “I worked on him, and . . . I’ll keep working on him.”

  “We don’t have much time,” Renee said and stared at her cards, confused as to where she’d left off with the game. “We’re getting noticed. We’ve got a tank of water burning holes in our backyard. I need to make a decision. If Gregor isn’t going to do it, it’s got to be someone else. Link, Martin, Salzar, Charles.” She shrugged.
“I haven’t decided who’s next.” They were not, the rest of them, a basket of Easter eggs from which any choice might be pretty, more like deer droppings, or worse. She needed someone with a deep history here, a wisdom and influence. There was just the one that might work, and the rest she wasn’t sure she should bother with.

  Jamal nodded. Hearing those names brought a flush of heat to his face. If any of them did come in, there would be some talking to do. He wondered if he could fight against his own father. But he’d made his choice. You could not make an allegiance to a family-run drug trade. There was no idea there, there was nothing to swear to. He balled his fist, closing the to-do list from view. “How much time?”

  “Twenty-four hours,” Renee said.

  “Is anyone even playing?” Bea said.

  “I’ll play. I’ll totally play,” Jamal said.

  Renee handed him her cards. “I’m lost here, you take mine.”

  “I warn you, no one’s more lucky,” Jamal said.

  Renee swallowed hard at this as she made way for him. She had firsthand proof of Jamal’s luckiness.

  “And also, I cheat.” He shrugged as if that were just the way things were.

  Renee lay back on the cot and listened to the two play and decided to give herself two minutes there. After the recruitment of a strong arm, the number and scope of items that had to be done was dizzying. Lieutenants, she said to herself, the word arising up from some Napoleonic history lesson, conjuring up someone who might wear tassels on his suit coat and carry a saber and wear a handlebar mustache, which Bea would look nice with. She chuckled at the thought and could hear the two of them pause to look over at her. The smell of their unwashed bodies was rank in the room. Lieutenants playing cribbage. She loved them, and loved listening to their game banter, manifesting in counting and cursing at each other: fifteen two fifteen four a run for three makes seven. And the crib—fuck. really? fuck—that’s right, for fourteen. Lieutenants she had put in terrible danger and was on the verge of doing again, digging their hole deeper, and this sobered her so that her muscles locked in place, frozen, with her breath held. She was the one playing the game, the one pushing the all-in bet into the middle of the table, gambling them like chips.

  Gregor decided to go there himself. If you were going to do this sort of thing, you didn’t call her to you. He knew that. For the first time in a long time, the roles were reversed.

  He didn’t leave the house much anymore and felt odd preparing himself for the out-of-doors. He sent people scurrying about in front of him: prepare his bike, find his clothes, tell her he’s coming.

  When he was finally on his bike in the front yard he looked up at the neighboring houses, trying to remember which unfortunate interactions he’d had with each. Which were his allies, which not. He felt a sort of mortification. Like a man raised from his tomb into a different time, blinking into the sun. Gone soft and dead in the interminable years.

  He wore the eight men who accompanied him him like a suit of armor as he rode, a Roman phalanx of pedalers. He could have fired up the Cadillac, but it was so out of repair at this point, and carried so few. Nor did it seem appropriate for the task at hand, somehow.

  He was not an indecisive man, not by any stretch of the imagination, and so it was startling to have his mind offer up alternatives and second-opinions and double-thinks as he rode, nearly bringing him to the point of steering the whole damn column of them back home. But he persisted, as all men of firm opinions do, for even as his mind faltered, it bolstered itself too, fortified and re-fortified, shooting justifications like warning shots across the bow, so that he glared straight forward and pedaled without speaking, bent on their destination. He had not been under anyone else’s employ for some time. More than anything it took courage, he was coming to find.

  Jamal, who rode to his right, thought the woman was destined to do what she set out to do. And that was one quandary he’d swept around his mind. If she were to succeed, there would be a persuasion necessary for anyone—anyone with power—not affiliated. And he knew, he was now destined to be that persuader.

  People on the street knew him. They stopped what they were doing and stared with wide eyes as the entourage passed. Some feared him. Some knew him as the grandfatherly Pop who rolled in with charitable funds. It was possible that she already had someone. That they might already be heading into some sort of confrontation. But no, Jamal had assured him.

  As he pedaled he found his legs still had strength. Though on each upward pedal his knee bumped against his belly, his hands gripped the handlebars with, he imagined, his old bear’s strength, a power natural to him, that age could not drain away. Perhaps he was not so old as he thought. He began to set the pace and drove his entourage forward.

  The state of the streets saddened him, their previous vibrancy now thwarted and twisted by poverty, fire, and crime. What part had he had in this, he wondered. They passed a house that belonged to an old girlfriend of his, a tryst he’d had behind his wife’s back. She’d had the smoothest skin he’d ever known. The house was a small two-story built in the nineteen-teens. The porch leaned sadly, on the verge of collapse. All that was left of the windows were a few shards of glass. It was clear she did not live there anymore, that most likely she was dead, and this caused his chest to quake as he rode. Why had he not reached out? It wasn’t only the boy’s prodding. He was doing the right thing. He knew he was.

  They stopped at the end of the block, the headquarters just up the street. He caught his breath and watched people come and go. Bicycles streamed from her HQ at regular intervals, and people walked with purpose to outbuildings and neighboring houses that her organization must have gobbled up like a hungry wolf.

  “Well,” he said.

  “Let’s go, Pop,” Jamal said. “I know where she’ll be.”

  “We’ll walk,” Gregor said and dismounted from his bike. He would have preferred to have done this over tea, at his house. For not the first time that week he considered his desire for predictable patterns and routine. He had not always been this way. It is age that has brought it on, he thought, and here I am beginning entirely anew, beating back these habits with new, radical risks. He cursed quietly and briefly fantasized about turning the whole ship of them around again. What a relief it would be to re-enter his house, sit in his chair, await the next visitor, to ignore whatever impending chaos may come. But within him, at the very bottom of him, buried by time and loss and cynicism, was the seed of something whose existence he scarcely admitted to himself. She might pull this off. What she wanted, what Jamal wanted, was what he wanted. To separate from the whole rotten mass of the country, to carve the one good bite out of the rotten apple, to be free of their flags and rocket ships, their posturing and ignorance. Fuck them all. They could do better. He waved a charge! signal to Jamal, and they followed him into the compound.

  Bea stood guard outside of Renee’s office for nearly six hours as Gregor and Renee hammered out their agreement inside. At times the volume rose to a shout, and she winced, desiring to go in and kick the old fart out. She stood at least four inches over him, and she thought she could take him. She would be the panther against his bear. Go for the eyes, she told herself, punch his neck. He would be slow, but could take a lot of damage.

  It was times like these when she fetched water. She held the glasses in her hand for a moment, facing the door, listening to the muted shouting from within. She knew why he had to join—they would be the mother and father of Sherwood, the good cop and bad cop, the leader and the enforcer. They would be parents to the hundreds that now worked for the organization. But Bea didn’t have to like it. She waited until the right cadence in the argument, a moment she could not help but interrupt, just as a child might try to dispel a squabble between her own mother and father. Then she bustled in, as innocently and yet as noisily as possible, setting the first glass down in front of Renee.
It wasn’t until Bea had already turned away and was placing a glass down in front of Gregor’s spot that she realized Renee had winked at her, and this made Bea happy. She amused herself with the thought that mother must be winning this one.

  Gregor paced and Bea asked if they needed anything else. He looked tired to her, exhausted even, as he hobbled stiffly back and forth across the room. For a brief moment she felt sorry for him, remembering how aggravatingly stubborn and strong-willed Renee could be.

  Then she pictured his body as a crash-test dummy, and her karate chopping it, and felt better and left them to their work.

  As she stood guard, Jamal dropped by and listened at the door.

  “And?” he said. He rocked with agitation from foot to foot.

  Bea shrugged. “They’re yelling a lot.”

  “It’ll work,” he said. “If it doesn’t, I’m counting on you, babe. Put them in a half-nelson, whatever it takes. Right?”

  “I don’t know,” Bea said.

  “It’ll work,” he said. “He wants this, she needs him. It’ll work. But I can’t stay to find out, it’s fucking up my nerves.” Jamal tapped her shoulder twice with his fist and left.