Jamal had to grip the wall for a moment to let his heart calm.
“Can we not—personify them?” Jamal said, and then felt like a total asshole. “They didn’t say anything.”
“I heard you talking.”
“Yeah, well, I did all the talking.”
“What are you mad at me for?”
“Nothing. I’ve got more painkiller, you want it?”
“Does the pope eat french fries?”
“I really don’t know, Rick,” Jamal said, and then because he was talking to a dying man he felt he owed him an answer. “Does he? Eat french fries?”
“Can you get my water?” Rick said. “If I move everything’s going to leak all over the place.”
“Jesus,” Jamal said.
“Jamal,” Rick said as Jamal fetched the water, “there isn’t nobody who doesn’t eat french fries.”
Afterward, Jamal went to see Carl. He had not moved since he’d last seen him. He sat on the floor, his gun resting on the window sill, pointed toward the street. He peered outward from behind the curtain.
“Well?” Jamal said.
“Shh.”
“We’ve got to figure out how we’re going to do the night.”
“I said shush. I’m watching them.”
Jamal leaned down to get a look out the window, thinking perhaps Carl would take the whole night’s watch either way. “You do stakeouts much in the force?” Jamal flicked a corner of the curtain aside and at that moment he heard a great rumbling and the house vibrated. Then out the window he saw a big tanker truck with its lights off drive up the street and turn the corner.
“Hey,” Jamal said.
“I saw it!” Carl whispered irritably.
“That was a water truck.”
“Goddamnit, I saw it. Sit down and keep your voice down.”
Jamal slowly sat and then realized the dim shapes he was looking at were men on the porch of the yellow house. At least three of them, but the light was low enough so that one shape melded into the next or split apart. “What are they doing?”
“They’re waiting.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know.”
They sat and watched until a biker came keening down the street, swerved into the yard and ran up onto the porch.
“Maybe for him,” Carl said. “We’re going to need to do some shooting.” Carl sighted down his gun. “For which I am very happy.”
Carl was one of the best marksmen of the Going Street Brigade. “Can you hit someone from here?” Jamal said.
“Not well enough in this light to be worth it. Better to wait until they come for us.”
Jamal stood. “Tell me if you see them move.”
He searched around the house for anything that could be of use to them and began to pile it in the living room. He unscrewed several broomsticks from their heads and tried out wedging them against the front door.
He found some dish soap and, looking out at the yellow house, eased himself out the window into the darkness of the front porch. “It’s me,” he said toward Carl’s window, hoping the man wouldn’t shoot him. He squirted dish soap on the wood stairs, on the doorknob handle, and as far toward the sidewalk as he dared. These seemed like great defenses for fending off a few spear-toting barbarians, not gunmen. He did not feel like Robinson Crusoe. He had no bombardment of logs to free, no mountain of stones to unleash, no boiling oil to pour.
He hesitated on the front porch and crouched. He could hear talking across the street but could not make out the words.
He pondered what it would take to run up the hill and be gone from here. He could hop the side of the porch and climb across the next and the next after that, then hit the sidewalk running and be rid of the whole nightmare. There was sound from up the street as well but he thought one person could slip by in this dark. He could unlock his bike at the top of the hill and ride through the neighborhoods like a falcon, he could head toward that girl into whose ear he’d whispered a haiku, to whom his thoughts had turned several times as a small piece of hopeful adventure that he might undertake were he to free himself whole from this nonsense. The darkness beckoned to him warm and accepting, ready to take him into it, to conceal and squirrel him away.
Or he could die trying. He was the captain of the Going Street Brigade and he had to stay with his men. Getting killed trying to escape would doom them all, if they weren’t doomed already. Back in the drug wars he’d left a man. He’d been scared and run and a friend had been killed. The impulse to flee was fully quashed by the memory of that regret.
Nevel and Cora sat at the kitchen table and talked quietly after they’d left. The kids were asleep, and the leader of the independent nation of Sherwood had shown up in their basement earlier. His tunnel was officially that, now, no longer just a cave but a portal to another nation. He felt unease about where their house siphoned off to, outgassing across the border.
His wife was electrified. Cora had chatted for ten minutes with Maid Marian before they’d left and they had liked each other immediately. There was a feeling in the room like they’d had exotic visitors from a foreign country. Do they shake hands like normal people or do I kiss an ear or something else?
In a moment of insane fervor, of good will and charity, he took Maid Marian down to show her his cache of water deep in the tunnel, thinking to turn it over to Sherwood, to prove the mayor’s misdeeds.
While Cora and Bea stayed in the kitchen, he walked her slowly back into the tunnel, pointing out salient features with the flashlight beam without naming them. Something ancient and unspeakable made him build this tunnel, he thought. Or hoped, rather—his conscious mind was not entirely clear on its purpose.
At one point he turned and looked back at her. In the confines of the passage she could have been a Vietcong soldier, the tunnel a perfect fit around her. “Does any of this make sense?” he said, and she smiled. He wished the passage spanned out much further, that they could walk on and on this way.
“Is this the end?” she said.
He stared at the flattened cardboard boxes that covered the hole to his water treasure and his stomach ached with what he was about to do. If he showed her this she would have another piece of solid proof against the mayor. Perhaps he would be on the news. They would move to Sherwood. He extinguished the light to go through the hole. In the darkness he could hear her breathing; there was fear in the heaviness of it, but she kept it steady. He pulled away the cardboard from the hole and felt his way in. He whispered a hello to them, lined up as they were on the floor. This is what he had. These were the cards you held close to your chest. In some future history of his family that his grandsons would read, a single line descended through time to him now: This is how Nevel saved his family in the time of the drought.
He grabbed a single unit gallon and pulled it back out with him. When he turned on his light he shone it through the container so that it glowed.
“Oh,” she said.
There are hundreds more in there, he thought to say, but the words did not come out. Finally he said, “For your journey.”
“You have children,” she said.
“We want to help.”
“We can’t accept that,” she said. She reached out and touched his elbow. “That’s my job, to give water out.” She smiled at him, her eyes joyful despite the rathole he’d dragged her through. He thought he’d follow her anywhere.
Back upstairs they found Bea and Cora at the table. He placed the unit gallon on the table and stole a glance at his wife. He did not know what she would say. When she met his eyes he gave a quick, subtle shake of his head. He had not given their ill-gotten wealth away to a better cause.
“Nevel and I would love for you to take a gallon with you,” Cora said.
Nevel sat. His wife w
as keeping the secret, he realized, and he felt an immense love for her suddenly. Together they were doing the wrong thing. They could keep the treasure, they could harbor the little hoard for their family.
The mayor was playing Battlefield 1942. He lay on the couch, playing aimlessly, past the time where the game still felt enjoyable. He’d killed all of the Nazis and then he’d killed all of his teammates and then the citizens.
At the other end of the long couch Christopher sat, an open book on his lap. “What will you do when the drought ends?” Christopher said. He had owned a sushi restaurant before the economy broke it.
“You’ve already asked me that,” the mayor said irritably.
“I know, but it’s a fun question. I’m going to drink a beer, for one. I so miss beer.”
The mayor stepped into a bunker with the last remaining enemy soldier on the island and drew his knife and hit the buttons frenetically on his joystick, Uh! Uh! Uh! The soldier grunted with each stab wound, until the mayor was shot, and the game ended. “Fuck,” he said. “I thought I had him. I had him, right?”
“And then I’m going to wash all of my clothes. Maybe by hand. Just for the enjoyment of it. And I’m going to sit in the bath and watch the water drain out. You know those little whirlpools that dance above the drain, when the water is draining? Think of that. I mean—we could do that now”—Christopher tilted his head and tried to judge to see if the mayor were paying attention—“but I’d feel guilty. I’d love to wantonly waste it, just for a little bit. Like drinking water from a garden hose.”
The mayor switched sides and restarted the game as an Axis soldier with a sniper rifle. He climbed on top of an Allied bunker outside of a small compound and knocked off everything that moved until a grenade blast exploded him back to reset. “Fuck,” he drawled.
“And going out to eat. I want to go out for dinner and eat a burger, doesn’t have to be fancy. I mean sure, fancy would be good too, but a burger—bacon, bleu cheese—fries—how about a milkshake? Rations, right? I mean hey. And to go to a restaurant where it’s buzzing and there’s a line—‘well, of course we have a seat for you, right this way, mayor.’”
“What are you talking about?” the mayor said.
Christopher held up his hands defensively, “I’m passing time, same as you.”
“You know what I’d do?” the mayor said. “I’d run the city, that’s what I’d do. Something besides water use restrictions, police cuts, systems reduction. I’d govern a city that could pay taxes, united. I’d spearhead transportation initiatives, add another light rail line, I’d make sure schools had funding. I’d revel in the news that our city was growing, a desirable destination. There’d be art, I’d fund new arts organizations and set up city grants for local artists. I’d create a motherfucking monument—you know? Why not? Like say we raze that annoying lot on Second and Pine, and put in a water park—recycled its own water and shit and commemorated the drought.”
“With a statue of you?” Christopher nudged the mayor with his foot in jest but there was no response.
The mayor restarted the game as a pilot and climbed into a fighter plane and was silent while he got the plane in the air, a process that, Christopher knew, had taken him some time to master and for which he still had to concentrate.
“I haven’t heard you talk like that in a while,” Christopher said.
The mayor sighed. “You want me to be idealistic in this shithole? You want some kind of citizen’s hero out of me?” The mayor was being tailed by an American fighter and after a thwok thwok thwok his plane began to trail smoke. “Well, don’t, this is a new era and you better drop that fanciful shit. I am not the mayor of that city. My job is to feed and water these miserable shits, and to make sure they don’t kill each other.”
In an evasive maneuver the mayor took his plane on a loop but he was losing altitude and halfway through the loop the plane nosedived into the water. “Fuck!” The mayor leapt up and threw the controller down and Christopher watched the screen. The water washed over the wing as it dipped below the surface of the ocean.
Christopher drew his feet up to his chest. “This is getting pretty hot. Like maybe there’s some part of this conversation I missed.”
“You’re always trying to lead me into talking about some issue or another.”
“Well.”
“Like you think I don’t realize it, I’m some child that you can set on a ‘happy subject.’”
“I like it when you talk about what you’ll do. It did used to make you happy.”
The mayor left the room and Christopher could hear his movements through the house. In the kitchen he rough-handled a few cupboards and then he was back, yelling.
“I can’t be your project. You need something to do. Find something else to fuck with.”
“I just realized something’s happened,” Christopher said on a daring whim, knowing the trouble he was making for himself.
The mayor paced back and forth in front of the city view.
“What did you do?” Christopher said.
“This is about you, not me. I’m running a city.”
“Are they in Sherwood?” Christopher saw the mayor’s body angle away, as if deflecting a blow.
An outhouse program, farming initiatives, and a fledgling volunteer program were all new city initiatives, inspired by Sherwood ones, but they were weak, watered-down in comparison. Christopher knew the mayor spent far more of his time plotting up ways to splinter or destroy Sherwood than anything else. And his hate for Maid Marian had created a network of paid informants through the territory.
Christopher felt bad for him. Maid Marian could get things accomplished the city had no hope of. He was but a politician with low approval ratings. “Come on,” he said, “tell me what you’ve done.”
After a moment, Christopher patted the couch next to him and the mayor gave in. He sat down and sank into it, hunching his shoulders up. Then grabbed the controller instinctively, his fingers twitching over it. He clutched it to his chest and then, pre-empting criticism from Christopher about how they were talking, and not to play when they were having a real talk, he tossed it to the floor and sunk deep into the leather couch again.
“You captured Maid Marian,” Christopher said.
“No.”
“Is this going to be twenty questions? Did she do something? Is there a riot somewhere?”
“No. And I had no choice.” The mayor started to speak and then petered off again.
“We could be here all night. Tell me, we’ll talk it out. It’s going to be all right.”
“We’re seeding a rebellion in one of the Sherwood neighborhoods. Guns, water, money. So that it looks like they’re trying to secede back to the city. We’re funding a drug dealer to do it.”
“Huh. You and Roger?”
“You think I could get his help? There’s no way I can run this city with it all fucking splintering apart. We paint her as a nasty dictator, and take all the wind out of the other potentials, get the news back, and make real progress here. It’s the only way.”
“How many dead?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s a pretty smart plan,” Christopher said finally, and he tried his best to sound like he meant it.
“Fuck you,” the mayor said. He leapt up and resisted the urge to throw the controller again, but a burning aggression was in him now and he strode from one side of the room to the other in big, exaggerated strides. “It’s a smart plan. It’s a smart plan. It is a smart plan, OK?”
“What ever happened to good governing? You can’t beat her with politics?”
“No.”
“You can beat her with ideas and programs.”
“No! I’ve got to fend off Herr Commander Aachen, who approaches problems like a chipper shredder. Any good id
ea that goes through the council process comes out a turd on the other side. She has won the progress war.”
“That’s not true and you know it.”
“Christopher. It’s too late for this conversation.”
“Well, I think it’s depressing.”
“Stop it, it’s too late.”
“This is who you want to be?”
“Christopher, shut up!”
“You’re turning into someone you’ll despise.”
“. . . —No”
“You should self-reflect.”
The mayor leapt up and got his hands round the other man’s shoulders and forced him to the ground. He was easily stronger than Christopher and he shoved him down hard. Christopher struggled, kicking at him and grabbing at his face but the mayor kept his hold. Then the mayor lifted him again and shoved him back down, knocking Christopher’s breath out in an oomph. Brandon throttled Christopher’s neck and felt the desire for completion.
“Don’t,” Christopher said in a whispery breath.
The mayor collapsed in place. His head fell on Christopher’s chest and he sobbed, clutching him. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered, and then whispered it again.
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