Sherwood Nation: a novel

by Benjamin Parzybok

  When they got downstairs Señor Nombre and Bea were cursing at each other and suddenly Renee didn’t want to go back. She sat at Zach’s table in his building and let herself be waited on, and zoned out all talk. She played out what leaving the territory for good would feel like.

  Was there a president or king in the history of the world who just walked off the job? Surely a few. Ones who went back to waiting tables and making espresso? Gregor would assume control and that felt all right with her. It was his territory. She’d been flaky in the past, losing interest in school or projects or boyfriends and dropping them mid-way through, but the scale of this flakiness was monumental, standing-on-a-building’s-ledge huge, with the vertigo swaying you sickly, back and forth.

  She pressed her forehead against the hard wooden tabletop and rested it there. She didn’t want to solve conflict after conflict, to provide for them all, to have in opposition the mayor and the Guard.

  For a moment, in her mind, Renee lived in Zach’s house. She helped turn it into a micro-clinic, where good works were done and a difference was made. The stakes were so much smaller and she could be unequivocally good. There would be no punishments to mete out, levels of freedom to permit, and at night, each night, they could be alone together.

  But everything changed after watching the morning news. Renee pounded around Zach’s house in a fury of preparation. The footage of Rangers searching houses burned in her mind.

  Renee set Bea to work building a mobile stretcher out of a hand cart, a sheet of plywood, and a lot of rope, cursing the necessity to take the incoherent patient for the time it would cost.

  Gregor had crossed her. Had he so quickly gone crazy with power? Perhaps she would return to find the Rangers all turned against her. She wrote a list of items she wanted Zach to work on:

  Coup d’états, preventing

  Military allegiance

  Insights into data collected on informal power structures within the Rangers

  Jamal.

  Would Jamal stick with her over his father? She worried what an allegiance either way would do to him.

  Upstairs in Zach’s room she punched his pillow until her anger had worn down.

  In the hallway she cornered Zach. “Are you ready?” She could feel the power of Maid Marian returning to her. Her doubts had been trivial. She would return and run her country, she would do the job justice.

  Zach looked at her with exasperation. “That thing that Bea is making—I mean on a bike—”

  “Oh, he’ll survive, and then we’ll be in Sherwood.”

  In watching the news he’d remembered how miserable he’d been there, and he told her so.

  “Yeah, I know,” Renee said and did not want to have this conversation. She backed away from him, the guilt and pressure of her multiple personalities making the hallway feel claustrophobic. She wanted to promise Zach again it would be different.

  “But it won’t be. You know it’ll be the same,” Zach said.

  “I don’t know that—”

  “For me,” Zach said, “Renee—you—will always take precedence over that fucking country.” He felt remorse for having cursed it, the feel of blasphemy to it.

  Renee looked down the hall and could hear Zach’s patient arguing fiercely with Bea. Señor Nombre had become garrulous in the face of his personal involvement in their trip north and ranted about the safety of hand carts and how he’d wouldn’t be getting in one any time soon and shouldn’t she use some wood glue there?

  “What can I do?” she said. “Give me some options.”

  “Come here,” he said. He pulled her to him. “Fucking Sherwood,” he said again. He thought—for probably the hundredth time—that perhaps she needed a man who might pick her up and take her to bed, a solid muscular man who didn’t emotionally bruise so easily, who stood straight and exuded confidence in interpersonal relationships and, sure, was a bit on the daft side. A figurehead of a man. A wooden dude to be mounted at the prow of her ship, a man who was not clear he was even mounted there.

  He grabbed her ass and pulled her in closer and told her what he wanted, as if he were that man.

  “I want to sleep in your room. I want one night a week with Renee—alone—where we don’t talk about Sherwood, I want your country to know about our relationship, and I want you to be monogamous.”

  Renee seemed to cool and slip in his arms; she held very still and he knew there was a surf of guilt and indignation and righteousness that washed back and forth and he wondered which side of her it would reveal.

  People had relationships, she thought. I am people, and thus . . . but it was difficult to picture pulling Zach up front of the Sherwood citizenry, to imagine his secondary public face, too. How many people would they be then? Did she protect him as her secret, or only hide him? Still, it was a nation for humans, and she was first among them. “I’m sorry,” she said finally, meaning, she thought, to apologize.

  He clung to her, already regretting making any demands, but these things, he told himself, were not unreasonable. He deserved them.

  He thought of the map room and the systems he had created. I am the architect, he told himself. He dropped his arms and stood straight and she leaned into him. This is mine to ask. He prepared to say he would not return.

  “No, you’re right, I will promise those things,” she said. They were both quiet then in the agreement, but he couldn’t find the embrace they’d had, couldn’t get her back into the angle of intimacy. They kissed and she asked if he was coming now for sure and he said yes and she said thank you and unraveled from him and walked up the hall. He wondered if he’d broken it, if by merely stating what he wanted, he’d destroyed what he’d had, which admittedly had not been much in the first place.

  He went to his room and sat on the edge of his bed feeling wasted and empty and began to think dully of what he’d need to pack.

  End Times

  The news churned out two sensational stories on how Woodlawn neighborhood wanted to secede from Sherwood back to the city. In the first interview a blubbery soft black man in his late twenties eloquently railed against the tyranny of Maid Marian and specifically called out the cruel tactics of her general. The man spoke animatedly, a fine perspiration covering his body so that he glistened and shone with each verbal thrust.

  “Her general has raided our neighborhoods, entered our homes, dragged out our men to the street and executed them. To him we are another class of people, to him it does not matter if we live or die, only that our land stay within his grasp, and for that reason we secede.”

  The interviewer seemed flustered by his heavy accusations and his eloquent manner of speaking and paused, the camera on her. “There have been city truck sightings up here. Have you spoken to the city?”

  “Of course, the city has kindly offered us its services and our rightful place.”

  “I know him,” Gregor said. He watched the news up in the map room, which felt bare without Maid Marian’s presence. A few Rangers sat on the floor. Leroy and Jamal sat tense on the couch and Gregor stood behind it, in his usual spot, fiddling with his empty pipe. After the shootings he’d idly toyed with how else to hold his pipe so that it didn’t feel as though he always held a gun in his hand, like a baby’s pacifier in place of the real thing. There was talk, he knew.

  “He saw?” Jamal said. He felt certain they’d searched and apprehended every person who would have witnessed Gregor’s executions—something that still rattled Jamal deeply, that opened a new and deeply troubling facet to the clouded ruby that was his father.

  “Barstow’s nephew,” Gregor said. “He’s a year or two younger than you. These are old grudges. For the losers, a war never ends.”

  Jamal studied the sweating man and pecked away at his memory for some frozen still from the wars that would reveal a younger face under the p
uffy flesh of the man on the television who was poisoning them, had poisoned their country with his interview. He could feel the dread burn in him as the news infiltrated homes across the city. The worst of it was, much of what the man said was true, albeit only very recently.

  Jamal was under-slept and his head reeled. He thought again of Maid Marian. His heart ached when he let his mind imagine the worst. Then again, if she were lying dead on the wood floor of an abandoned house in Woodlawn—why wouldn’t this guy say so? And if she lived, if she came back—he wondered if they would need to turn his father over to the city for the Guardsmen executions in order to avert a war. The country was too fragile to appear anything but just. He stole a look at his father whose face was unmoving and calm, as if his head were plucked from some Roman statue, and a rush of fear and shame came to his face. He hoped like hell his father wouldn’t try to fight Woodlawn’s secession.

  “Have we been asked about an interview?” Jamal said. “We’ve got to tell our side.”

  “That’s Maid Marian’s job,” Gregor said. “I can’t go on there—people know me.”

  Know what you’ve done, Jamal thought.

  The interviewer asked the man how they’d built consensus in the neighborhood to secede, and his look was dull and unchanging. “We have gone from door to door and heard story after story of Sherwood. Consensus was clear.”

  “We need an interview,” Jamal said.

  “No,” Gregor said.

  “Leroy—you recognize that house?” Jamal said. “Know where they are? This is live. I’ve got to find that news truck.”

  Leroy studied the background of the house and shook his head. “I have never been there.”

  “Damn it.” Jamal held his head and stood. “Pop—I’ll find them, I’ve got to go find them, I’ll send a signal through the network.”

  “There’s nothing to say, Jamal.” Gregor was obviously tired of having the conversation. “We have nothing to gain from an interview. You’ll lose your anonymity. Actions speak louder than words.”

  “We’ve had enough action. Now, we have damage control to do.”

  “You’re head of the armed forces; what will you tell her?” Gregor pointed at the interviewer.

  “The truth? How about that.”

  “Absolutely not.” Gregor turned to one of his Rangers. “I want everyone out of Woodlawn. All services stop, no water, no clinics, no volunteers. Close anything we have there. Immediately.” The Ranger nodded and left to give the order.

  “And so that’s it?” Jamal stood and began to pace. “The city did this, they’re undermining us, and we let them?”

  “We cannot risk the fight,” Gregor said.

  “I agree, I’m agreeing with you—not on the ground. But the fight is in the news,” Jamal said. “We can’t risk not fighting there.”

  “We’re fucking criminals, Jamal, that’s how they see us. You know that. We can’t be on the news. They’d slaughter you.”

  “Then we send someone else. What about that guy?” Jamal motioned toward their sweaty adversary.

  Gregor shrugged. “He has the city’s backing.”

  “But what’s next? We lose King neighborhood? All because of some asshole on the city payroll?”

  “Jamal.” His father pointed the barrel-end of his pipe at him with a clenched fist. “The answer is no.”

  Jamal paced furiously along one side of the large map room and then left. The way things were going, they were going to lose the country by the end of the night. His father couldn’t see it.

  Downstairs he found one of Gregor’s assistants. “Did the news contact us?”

  “Yes.”

  “About an interview?”

  The Ranger nodded.

  “Fuck.” Jamal felt like the ground was spinning under him. His father was fighting an old war. The stakes and the way the war was fought had changed. He made his way outside and to the street, not knowing what to do, just needing to get away from the house.

  A communications Ranger pulled up in front of headquarters and dismounted from her bike.

  “Stop,” Jamal said. He grabbed hold of her handlebars and bowed his head for a breath. “I need you to send a message, right now.” He pulled her into the middle of the street, in view of the Ranger on the corner. Jamal checked his watch. There were fifty minutes of the newscast left before the city was plunged back into darkness.

  “Send, shit, OK, send a message everywhere, every single Ranger gets this, OK? This is what I want—every Ranger look for a news van—it’s in Sherwood somewhere, there’s definitely one in Woodlawn, oh Christ.” Jamal sunk to his haunches and clasped his head. “Yes we’ve got to go in there, this is important.”

  “What’s going on? What’s the message?” the Ranger said. She watched the captain of the Going Street Brigade with alarm.

  “I need an interview with the news tonight! Right now! What should I do?”

  The Ranger asked what happened, dread spilling across her features.

  “Never mind, help me, quick. Get everyone to look for the news van—have the van meet me in the clinic on Thirty Third and Killingsworth, near the grocery.”

  “Yes, sir.” She used her LED to send a message. She repeated it several times and Jamal could see the answering flashes.

  “And now—fuck, I’m sorry, can I have your bike?”

  She looked down at her bike. “I—I’m just off shift. That’s my neighborhood, can I ride you?”

  Jamal climbed onto her bike rack, custom-made to support a heavy load of water. “OK, but please god, please ride fast.”

  The Ranger mounted her bike and he held onto her, finding himself in intimate contact with the second Sherwood employee in less than forty-eight hours. His hands burned on her hips. As they rode through the darkening streets—still lit partially by the lights of houses—each house flickered with blue light as everyone tuned in, as each house processed this new evil in Sherwood, the combative floating island of Woodlawn, as it drifted its allegiances. But as he stared into her back, he forgot everything. He couldn’t figure out her race. She was a mixed-up affair, black or Indian maybe, or some of both, and he fantasized about seeing her in a dress, rather than a green uniform, which for him had begun to epitomize the opposite of sexuality. A red dot painted on her third eye. Dancing over him in some faraway bedroom.

  As the wind blew he caught brief flashes of her neck, where a small black beetle was tattooed. Her black hair whipped into his face and he closed his eyes and let it. As general, Gregor had forbidden him from having any relations with another Ranger. As general, he had also forbidden him to give an interview.

  He desired to say to hell with it to the whole enterprise then, to embrace this girl, let his desires consume his job and his thinking and his everything, to go home with her and spend the night in her bed, forgetting and forgetting over again, until they were exhausted with forgetting, and then to sleep.

  He thought: Sherwood is the only place I’ve ever wanted to be. He would tell the camera that and they would see it was true.

  The ride was spine-jarringly bumpy on the back of the bike and he used it as an excuse to hold on to her more tightly. When a surge of dust kicked up in the wind he pressed his face into her back.

  When they arrived he dismounted reluctantly. The news van was not there and she studied him. “You’re going to be OK?”

  He saw in her look she’d been aware of how he’d held on to her, an expression of soft surprise, as if the stone she’d plucked from the ground was instead a seashell where no seashell should be. There was no malice or irritation there. He felt embarrassed and aroused and smiled and said thanks and jogged toward the clinic.

  His watch said thirty-one minutes until blackout. He paced in front of the clinic, the jittery anxiety of impending calamity retu
rning to him, and then sat on the curb. As time ticked toward blackout he despaired that all was lost. This new country was home now. He’d been built for it. Looking back at his life, his family, the drug wars and everything—it became clear that that his history was a product of living in the wrong nation. The city outside felt like a disconnected chaos, a war zone; inside they’d built a fabric. Inside he had a purpose. Inside he was right, his true self. Take that away and he was just a henchman for a drug lord.

  Jamal took off his T-shirt and used the inside of it to clean his face and smooth his hair as best as he was able.

  He saw the Ranger circling back around. She pulled up in front of him.

  “Here,” she said, “let me help.” She took his T-shirt from him and wiped it along his neck, and being touched caused a chill to run through him with a sudden shiver, making his teeth clatter klak klak.

  “I hope they come,” he said, looking up the street again.

  She put her hand on his shoulder in a passing gesture and said she’d gotten a message back. They were hurrying.

  “Oh fuck, great,” he said, the fear moving into stage fright. “Thank you,” he said. And then smiled at her a beat too long. He would be on live television shortly, defending their country, and in his brain hummed a bees’ nest. Mostly, he wanted her to talk, to keep talking. To give her some reason to stay a while and so he could keep watching her and not think. “You talk,” he said, “I’m going to sit here and not freak out.”