The mayor had acquired a copy of Maid Marian’s letter to the residents of Sherwood and the paper burned in his hands. The news channel had given it to him as a courtesy before they aired its contents. He circled his couch with it, waiting for Christopher to wake up from his nap. Christopher would know what to do. Together they could craft a response—he could go on the news—during the weather—with a brilliant speech. He would guffaw with scorn at their water taxes and her plea to give her a week of faith. Faith! Next she would be expecting them to sacrifice virgins to her.
He flattened out the letter on the table that overlooked the city and self-consciously glanced up toward Sherwood, as if she could see him standing there, obsessing over her letter. Then he looked toward the bedroom door again. Christopher was sleeping his fucking life away.
He eased open the door to the room and saw Christopher’s form in the sheets. His lips parted slightly as he slept. The last few years had aged him. Drought years, years he’d been mayor, hard years on anyone. Still, the beauty of the man he’d first met was present, on his face, but also in the mayor’s mind. Those first impressions of Christopher from years ago etched deeply enough so that when he looked at his partner’s face, years of memories overlaid themselves on top, and he saw his partner in two worlds, young and happy, and older now, married to the mayor.
The mayor put his hand on Christopher’s hip but he remained deep in sleep. The feel of that hip under the sheet, still sharp and interestingly contoured, lean after all this time, was arousing. That and, for some goddamn reason, Maid Marian’s letter. Crumpled and flattened on the table where he’d left it. Its message bore implications of his own impending doom, so that all there was left for a man was carnal indulgence.
He stripped his clothes off and crawled into bed and pressed his lips to the back of his partner’s neck and inhaled. The scent of his husband’s skin was complex; it brought comfort and relief and lust and a welling up of gratitude. He clutched him and Christopher protested that he was asleep but it was no serious protest and he turned toward the mayor.
Later the mayor fetched the letter and Christopher read it in bed next to him in British-accented falsetto and the mayor laughed with happy relief and pretended she was someone else’s adversary.
“But Bran, you have to go on tonight,” Christopher said, all at once serious.
“Must I?” The mayor groaned, though he’d known it to be so.
“Of course. Let’s get this done.” Christopher fetched a pencil and a pad of paper and brought it back to the bed, and together, in the leavened moments of afterglow they composed a rebuttal: half rant, half reason. A plea to the thinking citizen. The mayor needed everyone to know he was serious about city changes. They would quickly dilute Maid Marian’s message with progressive action of their own. He’d bring in new advisors, announce some new proposals, give everyone an extra bonus water day from city reserves.
“Do we have that? Can we do that without it going through council?” Christopher said.
“Fuck the council. Get Jenny on the radio and ask her to round up any serious activists from the Southeast neighborhoods. We’ll—I don’t know, tell them we’ll have a town hall once a week or something. Let everyone know their voice is heard. It’ll scare the hell out of them, and then we’ll surprise them with our outreach.”
A moment later Christopher came back to bed and told him that Jenny had defected to Sherwood.
The mayor leapt out of bed and ran to the sliding glass door in the living room and flung it open. “Fuck you!” he bellowed toward the Northeast, and then he leaned on the balcony and held his head in his hands until he became aware he was standing naked in plain view of passers-by below.
“Who do we have left there we like?” the mayor said from the bedroom door.
Christopher shrugged and tapped the notepad with the pencil. “Let’s get in touch with the news. You need to be seen. You need to talk directly to the other neighborhoods. OK?”
“Would you call them? I—”
“Sure, love,” Christopher touched the mayor’s face briefly as he passed out of the room. “Hold it together, will you?” he said over his shoulder. “Now more than ever.”
Smack in the middle of it the mayor lost track of his place. The teleprompter continued to stream words he should have been saying out loud. From the sidelines someone waved at him frantically. Noticing he’d stopped, the teleprompter controller slowed it down, and then reversed the speech to where he’d left off, mid-sentence, something about solidarity blah blah, stronger as one.
She wanted their faith, he thought. He wanted faith too. Wasn’t he their elected leader? As if she were some omniscient who would make everything all right if they only lived their lives justly. He was fucking up the newscast, he was going to blurt something out. The rebellious egg in his mind, that patch of renegade brain cells responsible for non-sequiturs bristled and bustled, waiting to be heard, raising an anxious class-clown hand.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw his newsroom handler signaling him frantically.
His lips parted and he held his mouth open as he tried to make out the next sentence on the teleprompter, the words garbling in his sight like some Arabic mash. Then he could hold it back no longer: “I want you to like me!” The voice that emitted from him repulsive, elementary-school indignant. “I’m honest too. She’s no Robin Hood!” The mayor wiped his brow where a drop of sweat stung the corner of his eye. “Chris!” he yelled.
The television went fuzzy dark for twenty-two seconds, as if someone had slipped a sheet of black construction paper over the front of the camera lens, and then the mayor appeared again. He smiled hugely, with a touch of mania, made a joke about channeling the leaders of nearby nations, and continued his speech from where he left off.
The first couple days had gone awkwardly. Talk about fires, she thought, and the putting out of, but need everyone be a match? And reporters had been everywhere recording all of it. She’d granted three interviews already. Borders were still being sealed off, Rangers didn’t yet have a feel for their attitude, and a handful of angry citizens gathered around HQ with their Sherwood letters in hand, wanting an explanation about what this nonsense was all about despite holding the explanation right there in their hands. Throughout the territory there were a dozen or so scuffles and a few fights, and at least one death that she knew of. The fights had been over the pettiest little shit—one Ranger had thought he could leverage his new position to get his old girlfriend back. There were a spate of robberies, in two of the cases her Green Rangers had actually apprehended the thieves. Finally, one gentleman in his thirties was killed. There was a head wound involved, but no one came forward to confess what happened and no family materialized to claim him.
She had no time for meting out punishments commensurate with the crime. When Rangers, to her surprise, started holding people prisoner at HQ, she realized she needed to set down some laws and consequences. After much deliberation with Gregor, they decided the penalty would be swift, merciless, uniform, and irrevocable: major crime offenders would get drop-kicked to the other side of the border and a wave goodbye. A special four-person escort service was formed to do the drop-kicking, and the “prisoner’s room” at HQ was quickly taken over by Volunteer Coordination. Minor crimes—neighbor disputes, fighting, theft other than water theft—would receive double volunteer shifts, with no pay.
After a few lucky days of news coverage, the immigration office had begun to simply add potential new citizens to a long waiting list. The territory was growing at a rate that would soon be unsustainable. Out with the bad, in with the good. She’d mention the penalties in the next day’s Sherwood letter, along with the good stuff that happened—as soon as the good stuff happened.
There were bits of respite, successes. Some days earlier she’d met with Commander Aachen of the National Guard, in the same park she’d later met the mayor. He’d sent a prompt reply to her written inquiry.
She had practiced her case
before she’d met with him, citing passages of the Portland Water Act and the US Humanitarian Aid Act. She would appeal to his honor as a soldier. She felt certain of the rightness of her case.
He listened to her impassioned spiel in the darkness of the park, where they both stood away from the danger of trees. The moonlight etched deep shadows over his eyes. Far at the edges she saw the machinery that had delivered him.
“Hm,” he said when she’d finished. The pitched tone of his voice was like that of a mother with a rolling pin in hand, at ready to use as a tool of punishment, as her boy explained how the window broke. He was not a large man, barely taller than herself. His white hair shone ghost-like under the moon as he stood still.
He did not ask any questions. As she awaited his answer, she sweated. It was not so hot, but her body overheated. Sweat leaked from her scalp and dripped its way down her nose, along her temples. She fanned her shirt to cool her armpits. She began to speak again but he held his hand up severely, and she stopped.
“I’m thinking,” he said, a voice more like a train whistle than a man’s.
The moonlight painted an ice sculpture of the commander, white and frozen stone-still. And as if on cue, her body temperature altered again. A breeze shifted quietly through the park and her brow felt a chill with the wetness there. She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. This is one way to wield power, she thought, to make me wait interminably.
He clasped his hands behind his back and for minutes they did nothing. She felt the slow gears of his mind calculating. She gripped her fist and swore to herself that she’d get what she came for. He was just a man with toys, with soldiers to order around, and she would back him down. She prepared to speak again, but then he smiled pleasantly.
“Of course, our job is to execute the distribution of rations,” he said and his smile stayed long on his face as she waited for what came next. “If you want to subcontract that job and take our payload, I am willing to trial the arrangement for a period of time. If you can do a better job than we can, and we expend fewer resources, what objection could I possibly have?”
“Thank you,” Renee said, wondering if she had just sold away a portion of herself, without really understanding the implications.
“It’s best not to tell Mr. Bartlett about our agreement,” he said, and with that he turned and walked back toward his entourage of jeeps.
She watched him go, his pale head floating like a second moon in the park. As soon as possible, she thought, I will sever my agreement. In the meantime, the small nation would have water and rations.
Even so, water distribution was a clusterfuck. The trucks had shown up with extra National Guard, looking burly and paranoid and packing large weapons, and each of the many trucks that came in had its own ideas on how to conduct business, as if the commander had only suggested a rerouting but gave no formal commands to his troops. Or perhaps he wanted her to fail. Some drove to HQ and did what they were told: fill unit gallons for the water carriers. The water carriers stacked their unit gallons on bikes with customized trailers—some hacked together from grocery carts and other wheeled vehicles, others made from scratch—and then set off for delivery. The process was painstaking and kept a contingent of National Guard soldiers camped out in front of HQ all day, which made everyone uncomfortable. She smugly accepted the defection of one of the National Guardsman that first day, whom she installed immediately as a Going Street Ranger. Her mantra of those first days: trust first and completely; upon betrayal act mercilessly. Some of the water tankers drove to their old distribution spots, where a smattering of citizens showed up looking bewildered and scared, and their water carriers followed trying to usher them back to their houses.
Bea and Renee met at 5 a.m. and wrote down a list of items that Renee called her faith list. After the mayor, in a bizarre television appearance, had mocked her call for the citizens to have faith in her, it became the internal buzzword, the HQ joke, and the first week’s agenda. Their job was to build a proof for faith. There were a thousand fires to extinguish, but the focus remained security and water delivery. When these were done she could point and holler justly: Has the city got these? We are Sherwood! (And the citizenry would raise their skinny fists in the air and cheer deafeningly, at least in her mind they would, no matter how hard it was to believe at the moment.) With each new item or diversion that demanded her attention, Bea stood at ready to pound the clipboard if the task did not help the faith list. At the volunteer office she spearheaded teams to build off-site water storage tanks, to research water cart vehicles, to lead donation drives for needed materials.
She and Gregor refined, and then refined again the ongoing Green Ranger training. They met with their small army of trainers—thirty in all—to build what they considered the spirit of the Green Ranger. Vigilant, warm, practical, ethical. Never standing aloof to one side, but intermingling with the people of their assigned block, always aware of the people they served, memorizing their names. They created a two-week partner system, so that Rangers could learn from each other, but not be tempted to collude with one another. As she watched the training from her back window, she bit down on her knuckle. So far, it was working.
Spinning up and sending out a decision was exhilarating, and she kept at it. In the mornings she woke with the thrill and terror of it. Now I am the boss of everything, she would think. Then the responsibility that came with the job would infiltrate her thoughts, sucker-punch her in the gut.
She had notecards created with the Sherwood seal stamped at the top of them and with the help of Chris made out the list of needs. Concrete sealant, rollers, tubing, fifty-gallon barrels, bicycles to power pump apparatus, various seals and silicone caulking, nails, hammers, wood. Solar cells or crank powered mechanisms to hook to computers and phones. At the top of the card she wrote: If you have any of the following, Maid Marian requests that you donate them to Sherwood. Thank you.
What a power it was when they loved you, when they dared not disappoint. At the end of a day she climbed the stairway upward, passed meetings in progress and went to the end of the hall where she shared her room with Bea. She was bone tired, as tired as she could imagine a person being, dead wood and ashes and dirt tired. There was nothing left to her. It’d been eaten out by the eyes that watched her as she passed, by the image she tried to project, by trying to be someone she wasn’t, not yet. She climbed into bed, pulled the covers over her head and wept until she slept. In the morning, she told herself, I will be stronger, within me will burn a fire of certainty.
The mayor sat at his desk in front of the photo of 1950s Portland, which looked down on him now not only with disappointment, but with exasperation. He tapped absently on his field telephone with the tip of a number two pencil—not quite ready to pick up the receiver—and attempted pseudo-calls.
“Hi, this is Brandon. May I speak to the douchebagging double-crosser, calls himself a soldier, manipufuckulador fuck? Yes—Hello?” The mayor put his face in his hands and waited. Maybe it would ring by its own self, an explanation on the line.
“Hello, this is the mayor speaking, commander asshole asshole asshole asshole!” He stood up and circled his desk, following the track in the carpet worn there by himself and previous mayors. The desk was a perfectly stationed island in the room to circle in times of mayoral restlessness. He stopped at the corner, picked up the receiver and held it to his ear, but did not yet dial. “Hi, Roger! Oh it’s good to talk to you, too. Sure, sure, sure. I have one question.” Then he held the quiet receiver there for a time indeterminable to him, allowing the hard plastic to warm his ear and his mind to go soft with fantasies in which everything worked out in his favor, for once.
There was a soft knock on the office door and he heard Christopher say, “You make the call yet?”
“Working up to it,” the mayor said and didn’t like how it sounded in his voice. “Just about ready to!” he said, turning the tone at the end into a positive enunciation of the words, an engine that c
ould, an I think I can.
There were no further comments from Christopher, and the mayor imagined that he had wandered off to busy himself until it was over, worrying for him, which the mayor appreciated. He yearned to be out there with him, doing some domestic activity in tandem, this whole business with the call finished.
He picked up the phone, and before he lost his nerve he dialed the number. There was always some subordinate who answered in succession, making the mayor feel as if he were dialing into the office of a swineherd in some high castle and had to work his way up the floors, scullery maid to chandler and so on. “Brandon Bartlett, calling for the commander,” he said several times, and then was subjected to various silent hold-periods when he wondered if they’d simply disconnected him.
“Hello, Brandon,” Roger said over the line. He had a high, stilted voice, and spoke with strained enthusiasm, i.e. as a root canal patient receives a gift basket.
“Roger, hello, good to talk to you. I’ll get right to the point.”
“Oh, I know what you’re calling about!” Roger said.
“I see, yes, of course,” the mayor said.
“I’ve been expecting your call.”
“Ah.”
“You understand that my job here is very clear, to provide humanitarian aid via the aid act. It’s not my business to concern myself with city politics!”
It was entirely possible that the commander had some kind of old vocal box injury, the mayor realized, something acquired in a military exploit. So that what he himself interpreted as shouting was simply the commander’s regular means of expression.
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