She’d not seen Gregor like this before. He went to his knees and began rummaging through a box, making an utter mess of the notes, reading them at random and then throwing them aside. He’d lost a son and a wife already, she remembered. “Zach is not coming back,” she said quietly.
“Yes, but why? Where is he?”
She didn’t want to get into this with anyone, especially not her general. Dictators don’t have spouses. Dictators have low-level, disposable concubines. It should be easy, like a toddler’s passing interest in a toy. You find a Ranger. You pick him up and then you set him down when you’re finished. Were these different times Zach and she might be together, but she couldn’t worry about the feelings of anyone else, especially not her chief of intelligence. And yet, she did, and it was her complex, conflicting emotions that’d finally been too much for him.
“Zach has gone home to the Southeast,” she said.
“We need him here,” Gregor said, he held up a crumpled wad in each hand. “He’s left a shithole.”
Renee shrugged dismissively. She wanted this topic to end. She picked up the handful of notes she’d been reading through and began filtering through them; her eyes had trouble with the words, her mind unfocused.
“I’ll go get him,” Gregor said. “He can’t abandon post.”
“How?”
With irritation Gregor said: “We’ll slip through the border and bring him back.”
Renee watched her general pace back and forth in front of her. She realized it had been a mistake to allow him to appoint his own kin as captain of the Going Street Brigade. The same kind of mistake as appointing your boyfriend to be information officer.
She thought about kidnapping Zach. Could they hold him here as a worker? She wasn’t sure. She told herself she needed to make the decision for the nation. If fetching Zach was something that could right her general and keep security from collapsing, then it was necessary.
“He’s somewhere in Woodlawn,” Gregor said, speaking of Jamal. “This makes six disappeared in forty-eight hours. We need a force to go raze the neighborhood.”
“No,” she said. She got up and began to pace on the other side of the table, their pacing like two pendulums working in opposite synchronization.
There were two Rangers under the charge of Gregor waiting for his orders. Leroy hovered close and tried to reassemble the various messes Gregor made while Bea read notes from the pile. Renee could see Bea work studiously at the notes, ashamed for being the last to see both Jamal and Zach.
“There’s nothing from Woodlawn here,” Bea said. “Only today’s notes. Last week is gone. Jamal must have taken them.”
Gregor walked to the Woodlawn neighborhood map section and tapped on it with the end of his unlit pipe. To her he looked stooped and suddenly aged. Renee waved one of Gregor’s Rangers over. “You know Morse code, right? I need you to go to the Vernon tank, that old water tower on Twentieth and Prescott. You know it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Take a friend and this.” Renee handed over the green laser pointer she fingered in her pocket.
“I have one of my own, sir, if you’d prefer. I’m a semaphorist.”
“Of course you are, fucking Zach,” she said. “Well, that’s what I want you to do. Stand on the south side of the tower and aim high enough on the tank with your pointer. He used to watch that tower for messages in the early evenings from the Southeast.”
“What should I say, sir?”
“To get his ass back up here, right now,” Gregor said.
Renee shrugged. “Please. Tell him Jamal is missing and . . . you probably won’t even get him, he’s not going to be out there anymore. You know what? I’ll go, you come with me.”
Bea stood up quickly.
“Goddamnit!” Gregor said. “I don’t know what to do with this crap.” He threw down the pile of notes he’d been shuffling without reading. He felt he was reliving a nightmare from his past, when he’d been willful and arrogant and at war with Barstow. Except then he knew who his enemy was.
“Gregor,” Renee said and signaled for him to leave the room with her. In the hallway they whispered. “What don’t I know about this,” she said.
Gregor briefed her on his Woodlawn history. He spoke in a hoarse whisper, an aura of defeat about him.
“But we’re not drug dealers,” Renee said, “we’re the government of Sherwood. This is not Zach’s fault. It’s not Jamal’s or Bea’s fault. This is a situation. We handle situations. Get with Leroy, pull a month’s worth of notes, read them all. If a note is odd, ask Leroy if he knows the address. Do your work, remember who you are. I’ll work on Zach.” She pressed her hand into his chest and said, “We can totally do this. We’re not going to fall apart.”
Gregor straightened. “Yes, sir,” he said.
They held each other’s gaze and she felt like she was staring into a mine the depth of which was unknown. “We’re OK?” she asked.
“We’re OK,” he said.
She could not read him, but his demeanor seemed free of resentment. It was the first time she’d ever seen him lose focus and she couldn’t help but want to apologize for giving him—a generation older and a leader for decades—a lecture.
“OK then,” she said.
The Trouble
Jamal sat on the living room floor and stared out into the street through the window. For a moment he’d lost his shit and now he was getting it under control. Rick was laid out on the wood floor in the next room with a couple of bullet wounds that would down a polar bear. He could hear his ragged breathing. Carl was checking doors and windows, looking for vantage points and escape routes, gathering supplies and whatever the hell else the man found it necessary to do in a situation like this. Carl hadn’t been shot.
Jamal removed his clenched hand from his calf muscle and tried to figure out what was going on there besides a whole lot of pain and blood. He unraveled bits of his jeans, removing them from the center of the mess with a substantive uptick in negative sensation.
“You hit too, buddy?” Rick said from the other room. His voice was wet and croaky, a forced whisper.
“How are you even still alive?” Jamal said.
“That’s not very reassuring, boss,” he croaked.
“Just—stay that way. We’ll get out of this.”
“There you go.”
Jamal heard Carl cussing from the back of the house.
“He hit too? We could be blood brothers. You do that when you were a kid?”
“No, man,” Jamal said. “What do I do?” If this was one way to keep him alive, he thought, to grant strange last wishes, to appease and by appeasing to leaven, he would do it.
Rick indicated that Jamal should touch his leg to Rick’s wounded arm.
Fuck it, Jamal thought. If this is what was expected of him as a leader, this he could do, as meaningless as it felt in the moment. They were out of sight of the window and he could hear Carl scuffling around in the back of the house. He assented and overcame a moment of squeamishness. They awkwardly touched limb to limb, a light brush of wounds, exchanging some microscopic bit of blood. They did so before they each died, he thought, and dying was alone, and with this tiny bit of blood he took a weird superstitious comfort.
He inspected his leg. There was no bullet wound on the other side and Jamal wondered if there was a bullet inside his leg still, hidden there like an Easter egg, a little metal bit of treasure he could carry around. His leg felt heavy, like it had an anchor tied to the end of it.
“I found our Rangers,” Carl said. “No one else is here.” He crawled into the dining room, keeping out of sight of the windows, and sat next to Rick. “You look like shit.”
“You’re not reassuring either,” Rick groaned. When he’d caught his breath he said: “Nobody teac
h you fuckers can-do attitude?”
“They’re all laid out neat in the back bedroom,” Carl said, “one strangled, the other two—they’re all dead.”
“Not going to be any help in a firefight,” Rick said.
Jamal looked back out at the street but it was still and quiet, as it had been moments before a hornets’ nest of bullets fell upon them. His calf had bled in a solid stripe down into his shoe before he’d sat down and he could feel the wet stickiness at his heel. The wound looked like an eye, and he stared into it. For a moment he again considered the possibility that he would die here and he felt a fearful excitement about it.
“Got grazed, did you?” Carl said. He’d crawled across the floor without Jamal noticing.
“Grazed?” He inspected his leg again, tenderly wiping away the blood to get a better look. He saw how the wound was a mark across his calf. It had taken a small chunk of flesh as it passed. There was no bullet inside, and he felt lighter and more able and a little disappointed upon learning this.
“I’ll be at the window there.” Carl pointed. “There’s a concrete wall in the backyard. The only way out of this is through that front door. Not a bad spot to hold off a siege. Tie some cloth around that.” Carl nodded at his wound.
After Carl crawled to his post Jamal began to come back to himself from an altered state. The adrenalin receded, his breath evened, and his mind cleared. He thought of his Going Street Brigade, divvied into duty and rest, some home with families, and wondered how he could get word to his father.
He used his knife to cut off one of his sleeves and this he tightened around his calf.
“Ask them to hurry up,” Rick said.
From behind the big window’s curtain—the glass all shot out—he tried to search out who had attacked them. It had been a great number of bullets. Quantity over quality. Though they’d done fairly well with Rick.
There was no indication of anyone living out there. Two of the houses on the block looked like empty shells, the windows gone and the insides stripped out. The micro-junkyard on the corner had a tall fence and he couldn’t see any visible gun ports. For his part, he didn’t plan on doing anything that would draw their fire. He supposed they would wait.
It was an unsettling feeling. Siege was such a medieval word, with archers and catapults to fend off. And time itself had to be fended off as well, as the castle defenders cut their rations and waited, and cut their rations again. He suspected that madness was the primary weakness in the walls and gates, that and a fear that screwed its way into you.
He needed to check on rations, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave the window. He stared out at the houses and tried to decipher shapes in the shadows, until the images were burned into his eyes and boredom and fright ached in him. He readjusted his legs and found one had gone asleep. The pain of unraveling it and the movement of his wounded calf made him call out.
“Carl, how much water you got?”
“Just shy of a liter. Nut bar.”
He and Rick had the same, minus one nut bar. He laid them out in an orderly fashion against the wall and tried not to think about them there.
“Are we cool?” Carl said from the room over.
“We’re cool,” Jamal said. He repositioned himself and stared back out the window and waited some more.
He needed something to do with the time and so he emptied the contents of his pockets and backpack and arranged it on the floor in front of him.
He had a clean handkerchief, three paper clips—likely the result of his trip to the map room—his pocket knife, his Sherwood ID, a hat, and paper.
“What’s in its pocketses,” Rick hissed, watching him with half-lidded eyes.
“Sadly, no magic rings or tasty fish for you.” There were keys to his bike lock, his home in King neighborhood, and a key to the stolen water truck he’d neglected to return. His phone indicated it was 2:47 p.m. He had the stack of neighborhood notes he’d stolen from the map room and a pen.
“But if you feel like composing any poetry,” he said to Rick, “I’m all set up for you.”
Rick didn’t say anything and Jamal watched him, wondering if the man had any chance at all. When Rick died he’d be in the room alone, and a terror gripped him.
He scurried across the floor. Rick didn’t seem to be breathing and held stone-still. He shook his shoulder.
“Yeah?” Rick opened one eye and blinked. “I was taking a quick nap, blood brother. I don’t feel very well.”
“OK there, man,” Jamal said, “everything’s cool.”
“Maybe I’m coming down with something,” Rick said and Jamal couldn’t tell if he was serious or delusional or joking.
“Well, don’t die,” Jamal said; was that the best he could do? “Can I get anything for you?”
“Hunky dory.”
If the shots had been heard, he believed enough time had passed that a message would have made it to HQ and a response made. Jamal began to resign himself to the possibility that no response would come.
“Carl?” he said. Carl had sequestered himself in the room on the other side of the entranceway, and he hadn’t heard anything from him for a while.
Carl said something that ended in “gun” that Jamal couldn’t understand.
“Think they aim to starve us out?” Jamal said.
“Just one little shot,” Carl said. “I’ve been deducing which house to shoot at.”
“Could last a couple days. They’ll know we’re missing before that, they’ll send people, right?”
“Maybe the yellow house,” Carl said, “that’s the one I got a bad feeling about. Sending off some serious vibes.”
“Yeah, hmm. They want some kind of war here, but who even is it.”
“I bet they’ve been watching us this whole time,” Carl said.
“Charles, I guess,” Jamal said.
“They’re hoping we’ll bleed to death, but they didn’t even hit me. I’m not bleeding one bit.”
“They hit Rick pretty good,” Jamal said.
“I’m not going to bleed to death.”
“Carl!” Jamal shouted, trying to get the man’s attention, realizing their conversations were only loosely connected.
There was a long pause, and then Carl said, “Yeah?”
“How’s it going, man?”
“You already asked that.”
“Think we should make a run for it? I am bored out of my mind.” He kicked at the edge of the wall with his non-wounded leg.
There was a deep sigh and the sound of objects being moved around in the other room. “Nah,” Carl said. “That’d be crazy. They want us to bleed to death, but they didn’t even hit me.”
It was glorious to be out on her bike going fast at night. She felt as though she’d left her new identity behind. Outside she was just Renee. Someone who’d once been a coffee barista, who had a boyfriend, who was a decent enough welder when called upon. Someone who, upon getting high, inevitably spent ten solid minutes laughing uncontrollably.
They tore down Prescott and she realized the last time she’d biked in the dark was their first night in the territory. There were no cyclone fences sectioning off blocks now, and she took relish in listening to the peaceful hum of the neighborhoods.
Power was out and people sat on their porches in the dark and talked. She wondered how many times they uttered her name just now in all of Sherwood. She repressed the thought. That was Maid Marian, and she was Renee. They shared a body, but she wanted to be only Renee tonight.
At the tower Renee looked up at the underbelly and then south toward Zach’s house and had misgivings about the whole thing. There were only three possible outcomes here. 1) He wouldn’t answer, 2) he’d say no, 3) he’d say yes. Now that she was out and had shed a layer of Maid Marian, she felt a
nxiety that he might say yes and come back expecting it was she—Renee—who was asking him, when it was the territory who needed him now. She wasn’t sure where she stood in the matter.
“Let’s go,” Bea said, impatient. She stood lookout and waited for Renee to begin.
Renee pointed the laser pointer and toggled the green dot back and forth there on the underbelly of the empty tower. She waited for his reciprocal dot. She liked the idea of filling the tower with water again—a sign of ultimate power—though it’d be a brazen display of wealth and a security pain.
For fun she traced the shape of a heart with the pointer and then quickly changed its shape when she came to her senses. It was a lonely dot there, a sole green point of light in a blanket of blackness. She stared down the hillside across all the somber houses into city territory. There were stars out above the city like a shining phosphorescent sea.
Her arm began to get tired and she broadened the arc of her pointer, making sweeps along the tower, wondering if he was there watching but refusing to answer. Come on, she said. She turned and pointed it toward his house, out there somewhere, wishing for some kind of brute force communication, a trumpet blast, a rifle shot, rather than the passive communication she played at.
She sunk to her haunches. He wasn’t going to answer, she realized, whether he’d seen it or not. It was for the best, his only reasonable course. Leave her behind, move on, start something new.
“How long have we been here, Bea?”
Sherwood Nation: a novel Page 33