“I’ve had to argue with practically everyone about coming here, so don’t make me do it all over again with you.”
“Who’s downstairs?”
“Oh—you know, Bea and the rest of my silly entourage. You’ll meet them in the morning.”
He climbed atop her back and kissed her neck, pressed himself into her.
“I’m going crazy up there, Zach,” she said, her voice muffled by the pillow. “I had to get out. I have hundreds of people working for me now, and it’s all on a sort of credit. I’m faking it, and the more I fake it, the more I become the person they think I am. I don’t even know what I’m like anymore.”
“Mm, queen of the north. Sexy queen of the north.”
“Yeah, that’s me.”
He brushed her hair from her face. “Hey, I lost my job,” he said.
“You? You seem like the last person who could lose a job. What happened? Why aren’t you at my gig yet?”
“The mayor hates you. You probably know this.”
“I sat in his car, you know. You would have been proud. I should have asked after you.”
Zach stared out his window. The city was dark, powered down for the night. The loss of the electric hum made each sound outside an anomaly, a potential threat, a curiosity.
“So? What have you got holding you here then?”
He tried to imagine himself up in Sherwood and couldn’t figure out what he could carve out for himself there. He did not join well. He could not lead and was a poor follower, and he couldn’t shake the feeling it was all headed for catastrophe. “I’m—,” he said.
Renee’s body bucked up against him. “Come on.”
“I have a building, I need to . . .”
“You got me into this mess, buster.”
“I, hardly—anyway, you rose perfectly to that mess. You went way further than I imagined. I’m the quiet ref on the sidelines, the old man on the park bench, I don’t play.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “You don’t see what you are.” To make her point she bucked against him again. “You see yourself as some uncommitted futzer. Come up to Sherwood and be an architect, do something big.”
“Architect?”
She wasn’t listening, she pushed into him, pivoting her hips upward.
“You don’t mean houses.”
“Nope.”
“You’re not going to tell me?”
“Oh,” she exhaled. “No. Shush. This is what I think about at night.”
He reached out and clasped a hand in each one of hers.
“I have big plans for you,” she said. “I’ve been waiting to steal you away from the mayor. Brain drain.”
“Shh,” he said. “Go slow.”
By delivery to his front porch, tucked into the old mailbox, Martin received a piece of paper called “Notice of Exile.” “Fred!” he yelled. “Fred, come here!” What load of tarring bullshit was this?
“Yes, boss.”
“Read this to me, will you? I read it and got it all wrong.”
Martin’s cousin Fred took the paper and studied it, listing slightly to one side, as if one foot were shorter than the other. He straight-armed the paper away from him, at a distance he could read it. Martin hadn’t realized Fred needed reading glasses. They were getting old.
“Here,” Martin said. He held out his own reading glasses and shrugged. “I’ve got extras.”
Fred took the glasses and fiddled with them and smiled with them on, ridiculously.
Martin sighed impatiently. “And so? Ain’t that many words on there.”
“It’s from that chick. You didn’t watch the news last night?”
“No, I didn’t watch the fucking news last night.”
“What are you on my case for?” Fred said.
“Give me that. I know who she is. She can’t do this.”
“Boss, she got a army.”
“But come on. What do we do? Just pack on up?”
Fred shrugged.
“I’m not going anywhere.” He was no longer welcome? He had twenty-four hours to move out of “Sherwood”?
“Lots of houses we could set up in,” Fred said.
“Really? It’s that easy for you? This is our home, Freddy. My da’ lived here, your uncle.”
He started to carry around his little Heckler & Koch KH4. It’d been his father’s, but it was in good shape. He didn’t like to carry one; it felt uncomfortable and there was never the right place to put it. He tried wearing a suit jacket so he could wear it inside, and for a moment he thought he might be fashioning himself a new look. He had to admit it looked pretty fucking good. But the boys all laughed and started calling him Mr. Boss, so he went back to wearing it in his pants, where it made an imprint in the aging flesh of his back. He wasn’t supposed to be packing anyway, that’s what irked him—that’s what you had men for! But he was feeling a little less sure of everything these days.
Suddenly the streets were full of green dudes and it was getting a little aggravating trying to run the business. He had employee issues. All they ever wanted to talk about was her and the country.
“It’s the same fucking place it’s always been, assholes,” he yelled at them, but he could see they took the conversation elsewhere.
Second, everybody was so distracted that business was essentially dead. Patience, he told himself. Everybody would come back after they got bored. Everybody always got bored, and they always came back. He’d let them take a little vacation in their minds, visiting the new country, but they’d be back.
Still, he sent Jenko down to her office to see what the fuss was about. Get an explanation, maybe a little leeway. Martin could play nice. He didn’t see why he couldn’t play under the radar, beneath the covers. He wasn’t greedy.
Jenko never came back! Just disappeared. Probably never even presented his case. A day later Fred saw Jenko in one of the green suits. Martin wanted to strangle the skinny little son of a bitch, and he had his men run a few messages over to Jenko’s house to let him know, one after the other. The more he thought about it, the more pissed off he became and so he piled on with the abuse.
He needed some alone time after that. He went down to his place in the cool basement and poured himself a small bath. It was heated by a wood-fired stove, and he took great pleasure in stoking the fire, imagining while he did so that it was her big wood house burning.
Turns out he’d left the Notice of Exile next to the bath. Must have needed to relax in a hurry last time. A little warm water kept the steam from getting all built up in his brain, so he didn’t have aneurisms, blow his top like his old da’.
She even had her own letterhead. That gave him an envy-pause. Why didn’t he have his own letterhead? “Fred!” he yelled toward the stairs. She had a logo too. The notice was printed on a third of a piece of paper. He could see the cut line jagged, like they’d printed three notes on the same paper and cut them apart. Who else got a letter?
He’d thought it might have been his rude little visit, some little vendetta she had. Now he realized she was purging. She was shitting all of them out on the other side of the line she’d drawn. They were all casualties in her war with the city. But the city didn’t like them either.
He had to talk to someone. Maybe that spic German, have a meet-up and compare notes. Just bring it up casually, you don’t want him knowing you got a notice if he didn’t.
Martin turned the letter over and to his surprise found something printed there.
Presenting the Sherwood Anthem
Composed by Jayla Williams of the Sabin neighborhood.
As if a myth from greener times
Maid Marian carved us a country
Drew twelve miles of righteous lines
Oh Sherwood,
you stand small but tall
Like the last matryoshka doll
Now life is good to us
She took the helm
Of our happiness
We make, we build, we farm
we teach, we bike, we love!
Oh Sherwood,
you stand small but tall
I hear your worthy call
I will defend you with all I have
So that others may love you too
Where life is our right and water our due
Oh Sherwood,
you stand small but tall
My favorite enclave of all
“What in the holy name of fuck is this?” Suddenly the paper felt weirdly contagious in his hand. “Fred!” he yelled. He didn’t like people seeing him in his bath but this was a disturbing revelation. He poured a little bubble bath in and churned it up to hide his privates. Where the fuck was—“Fred!”
He heard some noise on the stairs. “I need you to go talk to German”—he pronounced it hair-mun—“pronto. His English is not so good, you know any Spanish?”
But it wasn’t Fred on the stairs. It was like a ninja or something, all dressed in black with a black knit hat and a black handkerchief tied across his mouth. Martin stared at him and tried to figure out why Fred would have sent this dude instead; maybe a new hire? And then he startled into understanding. He threw himself over the side of the tub, a burst of adrenalin making him limber, splashing a giant eruption of bubbles and water, and ducked down on the other side. His KH4 just had to be in his fucking pants, didn’t it.
“Hey now, hey,” he said. “This isn’t a robbery, is it? This about that notice maybe? I—ha ha—was just reading that.”
He crouched naked on the other side of the bathtub. Humiliating. “You going to say anything first?” Martin tried to reach his arm around the tub. “Sir? About that notice. I was hoping—Fred!” He was going to have a few things to say to Fred, that was for sure. His heart thumped in his chest, a bass line of a rap song in a cheap car. “Tell me your name. Who you’re with at the very least.” He took inventory of the places he could hide behind in his basement, the man-hole, as he called it. There was a pool table, the bath, a bunch of couches. He had done some work on a dude’s skull with a pool cue once, but that was a ways back. “Say something!” he yelled and felt like weeping and pissing all at once.
Then the ninja-fucker leapt in front of him and Martin’s head whipped back and hit the concrete.
When he woke they were dragging him up the stairs, and he had a headache to end all motherfucking headaches. One eye was all worked over. Through it he could see nothing. Through the other the world was a hazy film. They’d put a plastic bag over his head! The ninja shot him in the head and he wasn’t dead. It was a miracle. The bag was to keep blood from getting all over the place, he thought, which in the back of his mind he was appreciative of. Professionals.
The good eye began to go dark and he struggled to get a hold of himself. Come on, Marty. Outside it was night and they were talking about him.
“Rose City?”
“Yes, thanks.”
“He’s naked.”
“Well, I wasn’t going to dress him. He was in a bath.”
“A water bath?”
“What else is there?”
“Son of a bitch.”
They loaded him into the back of some kind of bicycle-pulled contraption and began to pile stuff over the top of him and he tried to call out. Rose City was a cemetery. No way he was going there, but as he struggled to keep his remaining eye from going dark, he began to feel a hunger for sleep.
“Where next?”
“Twelfth and Prescott.”
“Oh man.”
“We’re nearly done.”
The other eye wouldn’t stay open now. Maybe Fred had let them in. He wished he could tell his cousin it was alright. He understood. Fred could take some of their reserves and do OK for himself. He wasn’t going to need the reading glasses back.
“You get the other one?”
“You mean Fred?”
“Ha ha, the dude was screaming for a dead man the whole time.”
A few days after Renee’s one night visit, and after spending the morning packing and then changing his mind, hanging out in various doorways in a state of pre-nostalgia for the building he’d not yet left, Zach put on his backpack, swung his leg over his bike, and started pedaling north.
In the end, it wasn’t a big deal. Several blocks were burnt utterly to the ground and the air was filled with a choking soot, but there was no human threat. On other blocks the residents ignored him—they sat on their porches or carried water rations back in protective groups or wheeled along, possessions piled high in shopping carts.
At the border he approached an outhouse-like structure and was hailed by a large black man dressed in green with MM’s insignia on his shirt: a bow and a unit gallon.
“What’s your business in the Northeast?” the man asked.
“Ah,” Zach said and tried to figure out how to say he was the boyfriend. “Do I have to tell you?”
“If you don’t live here, you need to be issued a permit.” The guard took out a piece of paper and Zach saw that the heading read Temporary Visiting Permit.
“On whose law?”
“Sherwood law,” the guard said with obvious boredom. The guard’s gaze wandered up the street and as he prepared to ignore the ignorant city peon.
Zach nodded. “And you work for Maid Marian?”
The Green Ranger looked briefly uncomfortable. “Of course.”
“It’s hard to get a regime off the ground,” Zach said. “You’re doing good work, I’m sure.”
“Do you want a permit or not?”
“I have a friend I’m visiting.”
“Location? If you don’t have the exact number, I can retrieve it for you.” The guard gestured up the block where Zach could make out another ranger dressed in green. “Visitors have to have sponsors within the country. We’ll send a message to your sponsor.”
“She’s on Going Street near Fifty-Second.”
The Ranger frowned at him. “Your friend doesn’t live there any more. That section is closed. No one lives there. Your city ID please and the name of the friend.”
Zach handed over his ID card and made up a name for the friend. The Ranger wrote them both down. “Come back tomorrow. I’ll have the location of this person if they’re still in the territory and confirm that she’s willing to sponsor you.”
“So I can’t get in?”
“No.”
“Is there anything I could do to get in?”
“No.”
He wondered why the hell he’d made the journey up here in the first place. He looked back the way he’d come and desperately didn’t want to return. He rode away in disgust—across the street and up a ways and pondered the territory. He passed a city police car going the other way along the border. He imagined they were always there, waiting and watching to see what this new entity would do next.
On a block with no guardhouse he rode up a bank, climbed a short fence into a backyard and pulled his bike after him, and then he was in Sherwood. He found his way to an alley and skirted round the Green Ranger who watched the intersection.
Above him the sky was gray with clouds and all at once a pattering of rain came down, moistening his head and arms as he pedaled, and he stopped momentarily to look up. It was a tease, as it always was. It would not stay or last. The dots on the street quickly dissipated. But nevertheless, he took it as an auspicious sign, and proceeded with hope.
He rode hard toward Cully neighborhood and saw that things were buzzing. There were people dressed in green outfits everywhere—whether they were employed by Sherwood, some volunteer force, or simply in solidarity with, he couldn’t tell. People were out on their porches, removing trash from their homes, talking with neighbors as if no riots had taken place. About a third of the houses were in a state of permanent garage sale, with items laid out on their dry front yards. Everywhere he looked people were packing things—bundles on their backs, loads in bike trailers, duffel bags over shoulders—he couldn’t imagine where they were all going. Perhaps this was simply th
e sign of a makeshift, functioning economy he thought. Trade and barter and the occasional sale.
At Nineteenth and Alberta he noticed that he was being followed by two women on bikes. He accelerated, and the moment he did they went into chase and rapidly caught him, pulling alongside.
“Stop,” a woman said.
Zach pulled his bike alongside a curb and feigned indignation.
“You snuck in. What’s your business in the Northeast?”
“I did not,” Zach said.
“Don’t even try,” the other woman said, wagging her finger at him. “You’re the third dude today. It’s such a hassle when you deny it.”
“I’m going to visit a friend.”
“But you were told to wait.”
Zach shook his head and wondered at how he’d been caught and how word had traveled about him already. They didn’t seem to be employing any kind of communication device.
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