Sherwood Nation: a novel

by Benjamin Parzybok

  He was vaguely aware that he had to capture some flag but the whole thing was over frustratingly fast. The mayor had obviously devoted a good deal of his term to the pursuit.

  They played again but Gregor became dispirited—despite the chorus of encouragement he was receiving from the Rangers gathered around the couch now.

  They finished and Gregor handed his controls and the mayor’s over to a couple of the young Rangers behind him, eager and obviously more experienced at this type of thing than he was. “Invite those guys too.” Gregor pointed at the mayor’s people, feeling as though they might all be a big happy family while they waited for the bloodbath, that what they might need most of all is a diversion. The mayor’s aides moved where they were directed with all the speed of drying dung.

  “Come on, my führer, let’s see why your rescue is taking so damn long. It’s hard to make demands for your life if no one is intent on saving it.” He pulled the mayor to a stand and the mayor cried out. “Let’s go look at our city.” He grabbed the mayor by the shoulder and steadied him as he hopped and shuffled and complained out onto the balcony. “Maybe everybody gave up and we’re suddenly in power?”

  “Roger is going to be in no hurry to help me. Probably hopes for the opposite outcome.”

  “Who the hell is Roger?”

  “Major General Aachen, National Guard.”

  “Oh. But he’s going to look like an asshole if he leaves you here with the terrorists.”

  The mayor shrugged. On the balcony they stared out into the city. Gregor nodded toward the pillar of smoke, acknowledging it as if it were an entity under whose service he now performed. He balled his fist and brought his right knuckle to his lips and kissed. A prayer, a recognition, an apology.

  “Still burning,” the mayor said.

  As Gregor turned to the mayor to make some threat or joke or caustic remark, a hole was born in the mayor’s chest. A repulsive sound ripped through the air, of rending flesh, and glass breaking behind them. The mayor jerked backwards and then was in a heap on the floor of the balcony.

  “Jesus Christ!” Gregor dropped to one knee, favoring his hurt leg, and peeked over the concrete balcony but could see nothing. He looked back into the room to make sure one of his Rangers hadn’t gone rogue, even as he knew the bullet had come from elsewhere. He waited for the barrage to hit them, and watched the mayor’s life dim. He laid him out and ripped at the shirt as Rangers crawled toward the balcony.

  “First aid!” he yelled into the room. They had made a terrible mistake, he thought, a horribly unlucky miss. His habit of being the last one standing felt supernatural under such odds. And then he tried to imagine how such a miss could have taken place, between a tall white man and an old black bear. Christopher was on the balcony with him then, holding the mayor’s head, his own face pressed against his ear, whispering.

  Gregor risked another look over the balcony but could see nothing. The city was lifeless. Inside, the video game console—which had continued to war even as the Rangers stood and gaped—went suddenly dark.

  “The radio,” Gregor yelled, “try the radio!” but it too was dead.

  It was not a poor shot, Gregor realized. The likely scenario came to him with sickening dread. This was not his coup.

  A terrible boom sounded above them, an echoing terror, and Gregor ducked at whatever new devilry was coming down on them. Some fantastic, fucking artillery.

  “Pop,” a Ranger said, crouched in the doorway to the balcony. “It’s thunder.”

  Gregor looked up into the sky to see a blue vein of lightning come down onto a building not far from them. The thunder sounded again and despite his inner warnings he stood and leaned against the wall to get a better sense of what was happening.

  The sky boiled darkly, and as he watched, with the sound of Christopher’s hysteria in the background, it thundered again, this time farther off. On the balcony he felt as though he could reach up and touch whatever happened there, whatever cloud god warred in the turmoil. He wished he could grab ahold of a leg and give him an angry shake. The sky lit up and another blast of thunder rolled over them. It was so loud and consuming that Gregor leaned out into the balcony, forgetting whatever sniper menace. Dust blew in a gust around him, circling the balcony, giving everything a quick coating of grit.

  With the mayor’s shirt torn away he tried to focus. He wiped away a portion of the blood with a wet towel and saw that they’d shot high, several inches above the heart. He exchanged looks with Christopher.

  “I didn’t do this,” Gregor said.

  Christopher asked him to hurry. Blood welled up in the hole. Gregor ripped another bandage from the first aid kit, smeared it with a glob of Vaseline and taped it hard against his chest. He felt the mayor breathing but his eyes did not open. He did the same for the wound on his back, where the bullet had exited.

  A drop of rain hit him square in the forehead, a great powerful drop, as if he’d been prodded by an index finger. It melted across his forehead and he whispered rain and stared up and waited for another drop, but the sky did nothing.

  “Come on, you cocktease sonofabitch!” he yelled into the sky and shook his fist, but there was no answer.

  Gregor turned angrily on the crowd of Rangers and advisers behind him who crowded at the edge of the balcony in a dumb state of spectating. “You.” He pointed at a blond-haired, suit-jacketed man who looked like he was riding out some ambitious career ladder. “Get a car! He needs to be at the hospital.”

  A kid Ranger in her twenties, having stared at the mayor too long, rushed past him and threw up her sandwich over the edge. Thunder sounded again.

  “Let’s go!” he shouted across the balcony but it was lost in a great peal of thunder. He wondered if they’d be allowed to escape or if the way was trapped. “Let’s go!” he yelled again and waved his Rangers off the balcony.

  “Christopher,” Gregor said, putting his hand on the man’s bowed shoulder, “I’m sorry.”

  Christopher nodded.

  “We’ll be blamed for this, whether he—whether he passes or not—and you’re a witness. They’ll want to shut you up.”

  “Yes.”

  “You could come with us.”

  “No. Thank you, I will stay with him.”

  Gregor rode the glass elevator to the basement with the mayor. Christopher was under one of they mayor’s shoulders, and a big, hunky advisor under the other, their faces ashen. “This chat’s not over,” he told the mayor, but he had long ago lost consciousness. Through the elevator glass he watched his Rangers take the stairs by twos in a hurry to get outside. He’d instructed them to carry their dead to the front door where he would pick them up.

  The cars were beautiful black Lincoln Town Cars. He helped the mayor and Christopher off in the first one and watched it accelerate out of the basement. After they’d left, he stood next to the car he would steal from the city and sighed. He felt a certain loneliness, an insignificance in learning that someone else’s coup had won out. He was just an old man who needed to find a place to sleep tonight.

  Inside his car, he inhaled deeply of the leather luxury, and then inspected the dashboard. It was immaculate and lacked nothing. Gregor drove out of the basement parking garage and into the open and stopped to let the Rangers load their dead in. Three in the backseat strapped in with seat belts, another strapped in the passenger seat, her head slumped over to the glove box. The smell of blood was thick in the car. He had known each of them.

  A dirty, sporadic, sprinkling rain obscured the windshield and for a while he drove along with his Rangers. As they biked he saw their foolish grins, their relief. Alive, and the miracle of a little water from the sky. He watched their faces through windshield glaze and it made him happy. They were like puppies, cycling manically and grinning like fools, the grief in them like wadded pieces of pape
r deep in pockets, to ignore now and unravel later. As with every fickle rain, they considered the possibility that this changed everything. That this was the end. Maybe it was, he thought, but he suspected it was not.

  Again, he thought of Maid Marian: holed up or in flight or dead somewhere.

  His leg ached with a nauseating pain. There seemed a certain rightfulness to his driving away with the mayor’s car. He patted the steering wheel thoughtfully and tried to decipher what might happen were the mayor to live or die. The National Guard saw the opportunity and took it.

  He was tired. He turned off of Martin Luther King Boulevard and headed east toward the cemetery. He would bury the dead. They were his to care for. He knew the Sherwood gravediggers and along the way he would find them, if they were still alive. Then he’d drive to Maureen’s to help her put out catchment for the rain, if there was rain to catch, and then he would put his leg up and rest and wait for what was to come.

  Zach tried to get through to her but it was like talking to the living dead. Not even a blink of registration. He would go with her, then. The fear of the impending moment rang in him, a bees’ nest as he walked behind her, watching for her body to jerk with the blow of shrapnel, launched from the next National Guard jeep that might happen along.

  After a while he realized he wasn’t alone. Behind him Nevel held his daughter Luisa and Cora and Jason walked hand in hand. Zach turned and tried to shoo them. “Go home,” he whispered urgently, “what are you doing?”

  “We’re coming with her,” Cora said.

  He told them she would be shot. They could all be shot.

  “She came for us,” Cora said. Cora leaned down and spoke to the boy’s ear and then he took off running ahead. Zach watched him run up porches and pound on doors and then run to the next house. People came out and watched Renee walk in the middle of the street. She made her way down Fremont, her face hard and impassive, like the bow of a ship in the ocean.

  Many left their porches at the sight. Behind them, the smoke from Sherwood HQ rose like a beacon. Many had believed her dead. They fell into place around and behind them, leaving Maid Marian at the front.

  As they walked the crowd grew. Jason came back to them after a few blocks, panting and ecstatic, and other kids took up his job.

  By the time they reached Martin Luther King Boulevard they were nearly a hundred strong. Maid Marian continued to burn in front of them, and they were the tail of her comet. Overhead the clouds were thick and tumultuous, a churning blackness in them. On the ground the dust was still and the streets were quiet. They said nothing as they walked. The only sound was that of hundreds of footsteps.

  Zach watched the back of Renee’s head and knew she could not be talked to or persuaded. He checked the streets left and right for Guard jeeps or city vehicles as he marched. Beside him Nevel and Cora and Jason and Luisa walked holding hands, Luisa quick-stepping to keep up, even her chirp quieted by the moment. What were they marching for, Zach wondered, but he felt it too. This was their ship. Without it they were sunk.

  By the time they reached Broadway, bicyclists and skateboarders had joined, and many more marchers, so that they were a swarm, flying straight to the center. They numbered into the many hundreds, perhaps thousands.

  Maid Marian turned west to cross the bridge, which would lead them through Chinatown to the center of the city.

  The National Guard had constructed an impromptu blockade in the middle of the bridge, having by now been forewarned.

  The crowd followed Maid Marian to the edge of the bridge, and she kept walking. A string of the crowd, an arm of it, reached out with her, followed her onto the bridge toward the blockade. Tear gas canisters were launched, and Maid Marian walked in smoke.

  At the front of the Guard, directly in line with the trajectory of Maid Marian’s path, was a young soldier named Daniel Curant. He was twenty-one years old and had joined the National Guard because he wanted to be noble and good.

  He loved Maid Marian.

  All night he thought of her as he lay on the top bunk in the barracks, wishing now he could work for her as a Green Ranger. In his mind the Rangers had risen in his esteem idealistically, so that it surpassed, even, the calling of the Guard. He kept a newspaper picture of her tucked into his pillowcase. He knew his chances, but even still he couldn’t help but imagine them together, with a little farmhouse perhaps, like the one his grandparents had had on Sauvie Island. Dogs would run and play at the river’s edge while they walked through the fields, and there would be a glow about her. And as she walked, he would observe that her feet scarcely touched the ground.

  She seemed to be walking straight for him now through a mist of tear gas and he was having trouble concentrating on much else but the hypnotizing appearance of her glory. She shone, her black hair like a blaze around her, her figure pronounced against the dark dust storm coming in behind her. He could not yet see but clearly imagined the freckles across the bridge of her nose that he’d studied as if he were trying to decipher a foreign language. A message written just for him.

  He watched the sway of her hips as she approached, unsettled by seeing in the flesh one with whom he’d shared such imagined intimacy, as if at any moment she might recognize him from his own fantasies or, terrifyingly, know what experiences he’d played out for them in his mind. Her face was stony and grim and it made him anxious.

  The Guards around him shuffled nervously. She came closer, unflinching in her stride, focused straight ahead, on him, it seemed. She was going to walk into his embrace.

  The man to his right, PFC Connor, said something about how when that bitch is finally gone their jobs would be a lot easier, and with alarm Daniel realized she was going to die. That unless she stopped and turned back some asshole was going to shoot her. His skin went haywire, sweat glistened across him as he panicked. He glanced up and down the line and with all his being he knew he must save her. Could he stop them? Take one out before they shot? His face tightened into a grimace of fear as he looked out at her over his shield. It came to him what he must do. He drew his own gun and pulled it up. He’d always been a little to the left. He aimed for her shoulder and tried to account for his deficiencies. If he could just wing her, clip her like a bird, stop her trajectory. Maybe he could save her. He would save her and he’d tell her that and she would smile and thank him. She would understand.

  He was jostled—several Guards called out when his gun came up—but he knew it had to be him. He watched her as he pulled the trigger, sending with it a wish, everything in his mind emptied into that bullet, the dogs on the river and the farm and the taste of strawberries and lying under clean sheets and hope, so that it might envelope her, that it might be the bullet that saved her. She spun around, as if she were a dancer, performing for him on stage, and then she was on the ground. He hadn’t seen where he’d hit her.

  There was a terrific cry from the crowd who waited at the edge of the bridge. As one they rushed forward. Chaos broke loose among the Guards and someone knocked him from behind and he fell and someone else was on top of him, holding him down.

  He could see her for a moment through the legs of others. He’d aimed for her left shoulder. They could fix a shoulder.

  It felt like a string connected them. Lying on the ground, from the crown of one head to the crown of the other. A rumbling blast cascaded through the air and he smelled tear gas. Perhaps this is it, he thought, they were passing on, one shot, the other trampled in riot, connected by their fragile mortality. Joy sprang into him then; they were to be wedded by their synchronous passing. The chaos swayed over him and then back, like lying in ocean surf. Then his view of her was blocked by fields of boots.

  The crowd rushed the soldiers and more tear gas was fired and guns were pulled. Another ear-splitting boom sounded, like God’s own angry voice, rattling the bridge. Daniel felt the bridge shake down to its ve
ry foundation. A drop of water moistened his cheek.

  After. After the clash and the blood trickled in the gutters of the bridge, and what little rain drizzled it wetly from there onto the banks of the dry river, after he, Zach, had struggled to reach her, and after he’d been beaten down and tread upon, a kick to his back that sprawled him out on the ground, after the people were arrested or dissipated or too injured to walk away, and after her body was removed, limp—he’d seen only an instant’s image of an arm swinging lifeless over the side of an ambulance’s stretcher—Zach walked up Broadway.

  He had not been arrested. Weirdly ignored as he walked away from the chaotic scene, in slow pursuit of the ambulance, his mind focused only on her.

  At the hospital he was told she had died. When the ambulance pulled in, she was already gone. A constant inflow of patients arrived and the nurse was at first kind and then increasingly short with him.

  Outside, standing a few paces from the hospital entrance, he felt insubstantial, as if his body were made of layers of old burlap. He stood there and swayed as people rushed around him, and then he continued toward home.

  He walked in the middle of the street. By now the freak rain had darkened it, the big drops falling sparsely. He turned at 20th and walked the bridge that spanned the freeway and watched I-84 below as the thoroughfare bore the military vehicles returning to base. His skin was numb, though the rain kept working at him, each one a surprise, chipping away the exoskeletons he’d piled on top, fashioned of fear and longing and necessity. His mind was numb too, a robotic insistency propelling him homeward.