“I want you to take a look at something,” Gregor said.
She was on her way to meet with the volunteer crew. Gregor seemed disheveled, or as if there was some kind of physical strain on him.
“You alright?” Renee said.
“Eye the list,” he said and handed it over.
The list was written in pencil in Gregor’s stunted, blocky penmanship, and surrounding the names were many other lead-gray marks as if the pencil had struggled with each line, tapping out time between letters written, or written and then erased and written again. There was no title and no other text on the paper, which appeared to have been cut down to fit exactly the five names it held. The edges of it were worn, as if it had been worried around in someone’s pocket for a while. Seeing the names there all together gave Renee a terrible shudder that came on suddenly and then continued to reverberate through her body. Her teeth chattered and she gripped her arms about herself.
“Sorry,” she said.
“It’s OK,” Gregor said.
“Can’t we give notice first? Like to flee?”
Gregor looked pained at the suggestion and leaned against the hallway wall. “We can . . .”
“I’d prefer it that way.”
“It’s—it’s more dangerous, you know, if they . . .”
“Of course,” Renee said, “but some of them will.”
She leaned against the wall and faced him, still battling her shivers into stillness. They didn’t say anything for a while. People passed next to them, sensing something of gravity in progress that could not be interrupted. It was intimate, Renee clutching the paper, Gregor facing her, patient.
“Warn first,” Renee said.
Gregor nodded and took the list back. “It’s complete?”
“Yes, complete.”
The nightly news reported on four gun-related deaths in a single night in Sherwood. The territory seemed to be arguing with itself. The news asked Maid Marian for an interview; the city wanted an explanation. An internal inquiry determined that Rangers had not been involved in any of them.
In the country of Sherwood, by order of Maid Marian, the second amendment was repealed.
“Fuck it,” she said, deeply aware of the taking away of rights. In her mind marched a procession of Sherwoodians past HQ with signs and banners and the appropriate chants, asking what rights were next to go.
She offered a five-gallon trade-in program per gun and ten units per box of ammo, and that message was carried through the water carrier delivery network. They received four hundred and eighty-two guns in all, far more than she had expected to receive, and surely a fraction of what still remained hidden in the neighborhood. These were hard times for the giving up of weapons.
The next day, Maid Marian sent another letter: She began with an impassioned plea, to mothers and fathers, to the common sense of the people. Security was taking hold in Sherwood, and she would guarantee theirs. Anyone caught with a gun by day number seven of the new country would be booted out, back to live in the city, no matter what family or possessions remained in Sherwood. They received another two hundred thirty-three guns.
Sherwood was gun free. Or at least that’s what Jamal told himself, as he steered his giant tank of a battalion through training exercises. They had ammo for a small war now. People had saved up for end-times.
He trained them in crowd control, emergency management, siege, sniper fighting, and survival tactics, making up most of it each night as he prepared for the next day, scrawled out on notebook paper. When one of the brigade knew more than he did, which was often, he put them in charge of that exercise. They trained for hours a day, but most of all, he trained them in restraint. As a shiny new country, a single entity in the sea of a greater city, they could not risk giving anyone an excuse to take back control. One death and one news exposé and the experiment could end.
“Someone gets trigger finger, you come see me,” he said. “Your neighbor gets trigger finger, come tell me. We’ll go down to the train tracks and shoot some dead freight. You want a brawl—be a Green Ranger, go on a water route, you’ll see action. But nobody here shoots anything, anything, unless I say so. After you leave practice, you are a lamb, understood?”
Zach wanted to go north, and each day he toyed with a plan in that direction. But he believed what the news implied—that it was too dangerous to travel to Sherwood. Not Sherwood itself, which the news continued to portray as if they were on the personal payroll of Maid Marian, but the neighborhoods that lay between his building and Sherwood.
In some semi-suicidal gesture, someone would set his own house on fire, or in a feud, his neighbor’s house. With the city as dry as it was, all it took was one fire before a huge swath of homes would become blackened holes. It’d already happened twice—great plumes of smoke made columns into the air. Fire trucks circled around the neighborhood looking for a place to make a stand. Their tanks contained precious fire suppressant—waste water and liquified sewage—that they dared not use on a house that could not be saved. Bulldozers lined up to build a dirt moat around the blaze. They cut down any tree that might be a bridge for the fire to travel along.
The daily death toll for the city stood somewhere between ten and forty, and yet he knew that much of this was concentrated into pockets of violence. And not just random violence; there were always small wars going on, gang vs. gang, neighborhood vs. neighborhood, for resources or control or just desperation.
Twice he’d packed up his gear and sat next to his bicycle on the ground floor until the light left the sky and darkness fell, but his house was a castle to him, it was his wizard’s tower. It contained family history and secrets and projects and—he admitted it—his bed, which he liked very much. He wasn’t like her. The physical unknown that might await such a journey daunted him.
And so he spent countless hours on his roof, his telescope trained on Cully neighborhood where she’d found refuge. A mere five or six miles away.
Seventeen days after he’d sent Renee and Bea into hiding in the north, a body slipped into bed beside Zach in the middle of the night. He leapt up, pulling whatever was at hand to him in defense. In this case the sheets, which he held in front of him now like a shield.
In the moonlight he could not see her face, just a long naked body, scars and moles and blemishes air-brushed away by the dim light of the moon, leaving a polished creature, a marble-smooth statue that lay there like some apparition come to love or destroy. Helix strands of intrigue and fear spiraled up his spine and he froze like that, his sheet bunched menacingly in front of him.
On the floor below, in his kitchen, he could hear what sounded like an invasion by a family of bears. Things rattled and bumped as their clumsy paws attempted to discover the subtle opening mechanisms of pantry and refrigerator.
“Hey,” said the body on the bed, turning onto her belly—for it was definitely a woman—squeezing the pillow to herself in a hug, her face pressed into it.
He stared at this new topography of her.
“I’m not going to be able to stay awake much longer. Your bed is so much more comfortable than what I’ve been sleeping on.” He could hear the sound of her grinning through her words.
He let down his sheet guard and got into bed beside her. “You shouldn’t be here,” he said. He kissed her back and let his head rest there, his head turned toward the hills of her buttocks in the dim light. “Now that you are, I’m going to tie you up, so you cannot leave again.”
“I’ve had to argue with practically everyone about coming here, so don’t make me do it all over again with you.”
“Who’s downstairs?”
“Oh—you know, Bea and the rest of my silly entourage. You’ll meet them in the morning.”
He climbed atop her back and kissed her neck, pressed himself into her.
“I
’m going crazy up there, Zach,” she said, her voice muffled by the pillow. “I had to get out. I have hundreds of people working for me now, and it’s all on a sort of credit. I’m faking it, and the more I fake it, the more I become the person they think I am. I don’t even know what I’m like anymore.”
“Mm, queen of the north. Sexy queen of the north.”
“Yeah, that’s me.”
He brushed her hair from her face. “Hey, I lost my job,” he said.
“You? You seem like the last person who could lose a job. What happened? Why aren’t you at my gig yet?”
“The mayor hates you. You probably know this.”
“I sat in his car, you know. You would have been proud. I should have asked after you.”
Zach stared out his window. The city was dark, powered down for the night. The loss of the electric hum made each sound outside an anomaly, a potential threat, a curiosity.
“So? What have you got holding you here then?”
He tried to imagine himself up in Sherwood and couldn’t figure out what he could carve out for himself there. He did not join well. He could not lead and was a poor follower, and he couldn’t shake the feeling it was all headed for catastrophe. “I’m—,” he said.
Renee’s body bucked up against him. “Come on.”
“I have a building, I need to . . .”
“You got me into this mess, buster.”
“I, hardly—anyway, you rose perfectly to that mess. You went way further than I imagined. I’m the quiet ref on the sidelines, the old man on the park bench, I don’t play.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “You don’t see what you are.” To make her point she bucked against him again. “You see yourself as some uncommitted futzer. Come up to Sherwood and be an architect, do something big.”
“Architect?”
She wasn’t listening, she pushed into him, pivoting her hips upward.
“You don’t mean houses.”
“Nope.”
“You’re not going to tell me?”
“Oh,” she exhaled. “No. Shush. This is what I think about at night.”
He reached out and clasped a hand in each one of hers.
“I have big plans for you,” she said. “I’ve been waiting to steal you away from the mayor. Brain drain.”
“Shh,” he said. “Go slow.”
By delivery to his front porch, tucked into the old mailbox, Martin received a piece of paper called “Notice of Exile.” “Fred!” he yelled. “Fred, come here!” What load of tarring bullshit was this?
“Yes, boss.”
“Read this to me, will you? I read it and got it all wrong.”
Martin’s cousin Fred took the paper and studied it, listing slightly to one side, as if one foot were shorter than the other. He straight-armed the paper away from him, at a distance he could read it. Martin hadn’t realized Fred needed reading glasses. They were getting old.
“Here,” Martin said. He held out his own reading glasses and shrugged. “I’ve got extras.”
Fred took the glasses and fiddled with them and smiled with them on, ridiculously.
Martin sighed impatiently. “And so? Ain’t that many words on there.”
“It’s from that chick. You didn’t watch the news last night?”
“No, I didn’t watch the fucking news last night.”
“What are you on my case for?” Fred said.
“Give me that. I know who she is. She can’t do this.”
“Boss, she got a army.”
“But come on. What do we do? Just pack on up?”
Fred shrugged.
“I’m not going anywhere.” He was no longer welcome? He had twenty-four hours to move out of “Sherwood”?
“Lots of houses we could set up in,” Fred said.
“Really? It’s that easy for you? This is our home, Freddy. My da’ lived here, your uncle.”
He started to carry around his little Heckler & Koch KH4. It’d been his father’s, but it was in good shape. He didn’t like to carry one; it felt uncomfortable and there was never the right place to put it. He tried wearing a suit jacket so he could wear it inside, and for a moment he thought he might be fashioning himself a new look. He had to admit it looked pretty fucking good. But the boys all laughed and started calling him Mr. Boss, so he went back to wearing it in his pants, where it made an imprint in the aging flesh of his back. He wasn’t supposed to be packing anyway, that’s what irked him—that’s what you had men for! But he was feeling a little less sure of everything these days.
Suddenly the streets were full of green dudes and it was getting a little aggravating trying to run the business. He had employee issues. All they ever wanted to talk about was her and the country.
“It’s the same fucking place it’s always been, assholes,” he yelled at them, but he could see they took the conversation elsewhere.
Second, everybody was so distracted that business was essentially dead. Patience, he told himself. Everybody would come back after they got bored. Everybody always got bored, and they always came back. He’d let them take a little vacation in their minds, visiting the new country, but they’d be back.
Still, he sent Jenko down to her office to see what the fuss was about. Get an explanation, maybe a little leeway. Martin could play nice. He didn’t see why he couldn’t play under the radar, beneath the covers. He wasn’t greedy.
Jenko never came back! Just disappeared. Probably never even presented his case. A day later Fred saw Jenko in one of the green suits. Martin wanted to strangle the skinny little son of a bitch, and he had his men run a few messages over to Jenko’s house to let him know, one after the other. The more he thought about it, the more pissed off he became and so he piled on with the abuse.
He needed some alone time after that. He went down to his place in the cool basement and poured himself a small bath. It was heated by a wood-fired stove, and he took great pleasure in stoking the fire, imagining while he did so that it was her big wood house burning.
Turns out he’d left the Notice of Exile next to the bath. Must have needed to relax in a hurry last time. A little warm water kept the steam from getting all built up in his brain, so he didn’t have aneurisms, blow his top like his old da’.
She even had her own letterhead. That gave him an envy-pause. Why didn’t he have his own letterhead? “Fred!” he yelled toward the stairs. She had a logo too. The notice was printed on a third of a piece of paper. He could see the cut line jagged, like they’d printed three notes on the same paper and cut them apart. Who else got a letter?
He’d thought it might have been his rude little visit, some little vendetta she had. Now he realized she was purging. She was shitting all of them out on the other side of the line she’d drawn. They were all casualties in her war with the city. But the city didn’t like them either.
He had to talk to someone. Maybe that spic German, have a meet-up and compare notes. Just bring it up casually, you don’t want him knowing you got a notice if he didn’t.
Martin turned the letter over and to his surprise found something printed there.
Presenting the Sherwood Anthem
Composed by Jayla Williams of the Sabin neighborhood.
As if a myth from greener times
Maid Marian carved us a country
Drew twelve miles of righteous lines
Oh Sherwood,
you stand small but tall
Like the last matryoshka doll
Now life is good to us
She took the helm
Of our happiness
We make, we build, we farm
we teach, we bike, we love!
Oh Sherwood,
you stand small
but tall
I hear your worthy call
I will defend you with all I have
So that others may love you too
Where life is our right and water our due
Oh Sherwood,
you stand small but tall
My favorite enclave of all
“What in the holy name of fuck is this?” Suddenly the paper felt weirdly contagious in his hand. “Fred!” he yelled. He didn’t like people seeing him in his bath but this was a disturbing revelation. He poured a little bubble bath in and churned it up to hide his privates. Where the fuck was—“Fred!”
He heard some noise on the stairs. “I need you to go talk to German”—he pronounced it hair-mun—“pronto. His English is not so good, you know any Spanish?”
But it wasn’t Fred on the stairs. It was like a ninja or something, all dressed in black with a black knit hat and a black handkerchief tied across his mouth. Martin stared at him and tried to figure out why Fred would have sent this dude instead; maybe a new hire? And then he startled into understanding. He threw himself over the side of the tub, a burst of adrenalin making him limber, splashing a giant eruption of bubbles and water, and ducked down on the other side. His KH4 just had to be in his fucking pants, didn’t it.
Sherwood Nation: a novel Page 24