Sherwood Nation

by Parzybok, Benjamin;

  “Motherfu—horror of god, you crazy bitch,” he hissed when his breath came back. But under the tree shadow instead of the bat his fingers found the slick topography of a human face. He yelped and recoiled.

  He crawled on his hands and knees until he located the bat and then he stood over the form on the ground. “Get up,” he said. He prodded her with his foot. He swung the bat and it thudded with the form’s thigh and there was no stirring. If this was the end of her, what a sorry end it was.

  “This is for you, Fred,” he said into the dark, and it spooked him.

  He reached down and fumbled around until he found the front of the rider’s shirt. It was a woman, he ascertained, and it was not yet a corpse, if he read true the soft pulse at her neck. A moment of exultation passed through him. “Ha ha!” He lifted her shirtfront enough to raise her head off the ground and dragged her slowly across the street, out of the shadow and into the light of the moon.

  Only by the short length of the hair could he tell it was not Maid Marian. “Jesus Christ,” he said, feeling disgusted with himself. What the fuck was she doing riding in the dark? It was hard to gather much more without light. Her forehead was wet with blood where it had collided with the bat or him or the blacktop. There was gore on his fingers and his conscience nagged at him.

  Could he leave a woman to bleed to death in the street? He cursed his luck.

  He gripped her shirtfront again and dragged her laboriously back across the street and onto the front porch of the closest house. He beat on the door with his bat and then backed off the porch and hid in the dark. No one answered and he dug his fingernails into his palm.

  Finally, he returned to the porch and picked her up—she was not overly heavy—and slumped her over his shoulder. In the other hand he carried the bat. For a moment, before the knee pain of the grueling walk home set in, he felt like the manliest of cavemen, hunting for a wife in the night.

  At Celestina’s place he slumped her against the wall, under the painting of Jesus, and leaned the bat in the corner. He fumbled around with a candle there, cussing each faulty match-strike until one lit. She was a young black woman with her kinky hair scissor-chopped short and a head wound. She was muscular and her thinness gave her a youthful gangliness. He went to wake Celestina.

  “Accidente,” Martin said as he steered Celestina in to look, “por bicicleta.”

  “Ranger.” She pointed at the girl’s clothes.

  Martin jumped. How could he have not noticed?

  Celestina directed him to carry her to his bed in the spare bedroom. She began to care for the wound in a businesslike manner.

  Between the two of them, they stopped up the bleeding and got her situated, but she did not wake. His hand shook when he touched her skin, which was cool and marbly smooth to the touch. Celestina, too, impulsively reached out and touched the woman’s face. They acknowledged this with a look as they fussed over her. Celestina indicated she was going to undress her for bed, and so Martin retreated to the kitchen. When she was finished and covered, he retrieved his paltry possessions and moved to the couch in the living room.

  But he realized he wanted to see her one last time. Celestina was still there, hovering over her in the candlelight, though he couldn’t see what work she might be attending to.

  “Ranger,” she said again.

  He didn’t know what she meant by it. That they should turn her in, like some kind of lost-and-found Ranger doll? That she was not theirs to toy with? Or that perhaps they would come for her, a favorite possession gone missing. Strangely, the sight of her caused a zealous protectiveness to rise up in him. She had been fleeing in the night. He was responsible for her.

  Celestina put her hand on his shoulder. It was a surprise to him, and he stayed frozen where he was until she removed it, not wishing to interrupt whatever feelings she may be having. Until, he thought, he began to feel it too, something. Whatever it was, the three of them in the room.

  Renee and Bea rode block by block west along the territory, one block in from the border. At 26th they turned and walked slowly toward the guard station at Fremont. The street was quiet and lined by wide, spacious houses. The people here, at one time, had done well for themselves. Bare bones of giant trees, or the remaining stumps, were prevalent. Even now Renee couldn’t see a burned house on the block. She led them to a few houses from the border station and walked quietly up the driveway of an abandoned house with its windows gone. Zach had told her of the tunnel’s existence ages ago. He’d tapped the map. “This guy,” he said, “just on the other side. I used to work with him.” His finger covered a house right on the border. “He says he’s digging a tunnel under his house.”

  “To where?” she’d asked.

  “I’m not sure he knows,” Zach answered. And so Renee had assigned Rangers to monitor the area. Recently a Ranger noted that the man had been spotted on both sides of the border and that he appeared after the border closed. Then a Ranger saw him manifest, his head rising from the ground like a prairie dog. At the back of a long-abandoned house there was a strange opening in the concrete driveway, covered with sticks and garbage. The tunneler, the Ranger reported, had wandered around for an hour without any purpose in particular that she could deduce, and then went back into his hole.

  “You’re fucking sure about this?” Bea whispered. It was the first she’d heard about it. They stood over the hole, a broken concrete opening into blackness. “You’re sure there’s no man living underground there?”

  “Yeah.” Renee smiled. “I’m sure. Don’t be a sissy. You got your gun, right? ” She relished the tease and chuckled. It was craziness to climb down into that dark shithole but nothing could stop her now. She shone her penlight down into the opening but it was weak and revealed only an amorphous gloom.

  She lifted her bicycle and tested the dimensions of the opening—it would fit going wheel first. She got onto her knees and put her head down into the mouth of it. There was an earthy smell and she caught something else she hadn’t smelled in a while—a wisp of dampness. The smell of dirt from deep in the ground, deeper than the graves at Rose City cemetery, deeper than the water tank holes.

  She put her hand in and felt around for some means to climb down but there was nothing and she got spooked, imagining spiders and cave dwellers and who knew what else. “Fuck,” she said and stood up. She pulled out her drinking flask and took a drink and passed it to Bea.

  “We could go another way,” Bea said. “If there’s a man there with a gun, nobody is going to hear it go off. Look, this guard station—the Ranger is probably asleep.”

  “Might be city police on the other side.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “I’ll go first,” Renee said. “You hand me down my cycle.”

  Bea looked at her uncomfortably and Renee took pleasure in being allowed to take the risk first.

  She levered her body over the edge of the hole and dangled her feet. She hung there—there was nothing solid upon which to gain purchase and she panicked. Perhaps she was dangling her body over a hundred-foot well or some forgotten urban mine shaft. Perhaps Bea would hear nothing except the fleshy thud of her body as it collapsed into itself at the bottom. She held on there for a moment, grappling with the fear and her knowledge of the hole, which told her a man’s head had emerged from it, birthed from the earth.

  Then she let go and immediately hit the top of a stool, which tipped. She crashed sideways into the bottom of the tunnel, the wind knocked out of her.

  “Renee!” Bea whispered as loud as she dared.

  Renee tapped on the side of the wall as she attempted to get her breathing back. “Oh,” she groaned. “I did it all wrong.”

  The floor of the tunnel was hard-packed dirt and rock and she felt like lying there for a while and contemplating the opening above, with the silhouette of Bea’s head and stars beyond, a sort of moon in the black sky of the cave. She wondered if she’d cracked a rib. It had not been such a long time since her last injuries h
ad healed. She stood and put her arms out to get a feel for the cave and found wood supports and clay-like earth. The floor of the tunnel sloped downward, as if the opening were the end of a teapot’s spout.

  It was deeply quiet in the black openness that stretched before her in the tunnel.

  “All right,” she whispered, “hand down the cycle, then I’ll set the stool up for you.”

  “There’s a stool?”

  “There’s a stool. It didn’t work out for me.”

  “You’re OK?” Bea asked, but it didn’t really sound like a question, more like you got what you deserved, hopping into a fucking hole.

  The tunnel moon eclipsed above her as the bike was lowered in. It was tight and she pushed it down the tunnel and rested it against the wall. Then Bea’s bike and then Bea.

  Bea turned on her pen light and began to inspect where they were.

  The tunnel was not simply a means of getting from A to B, Renee saw. It was cared for. There were pictures hung at intervals, the occasional rough relief carving in the wall. There were pockets and shelves cut into the dirt, and in some of these odd trinkets and other miscellany were stored. Someone had put in a good deal of effort here. They pushed slowly onward, speaking in hushed voices and following the tunnel floor down until it leveled out.

  They passed under several narrow, four-inch shafts that went up to the surface through which fresh air trickled in. She guessed these were for breathing or perhaps tests to see where the tunnel was.

  It was pleasant inside. Perhaps it was only that it felt good to be shedding her other self, to be on an adventure, but she felt anxiety melt away from her, even as Bea pulled her gun out and breathed raggedly with fear.

  “You claustrophobic?” Renee asked, and in the dim pen light Bea gave her an irritated look.

  The tunnel wended and they passed several branch starts, as if the digger had not known which way he was going and tried out other paths.

  Deep in, far enough so they’d resigned themselves to the completion of the journey, the way back in the dark too far now to consider, they heard a man yell stop and they both jumped. Bea killed her light and they stood silently.

  “Don’t come any closer, I’m armed and I’ll shoot.”

  Bea reached out and grabbed Renee’s arm, but they said nothing. After a while, Renee said, “We like your tunnel.”

  “I don’t have any water, and—” There was some shuffling about in the tunnel. “Go back to Sherwood. I’ve already killed lots of people down here. All of them are dead. It’s no problem for me to kill you two.”

  They were talking to a citizen of Portland, Renee had to remind herself. She’d watched city news and reports and correspondence came in regularly from other neighborhoods. Water crimes were frequent.

  Bea whispered, “I don’t believe him.”

  “We’re passing through,” Renee said. “May we pass through? My name is Renee and I’m with Bea, who is also armed, but we’re not here for water, we’re just coming to the other side. You sound like a good person. We don’t believe you about the bodies.”

  “Then go back and use the border,” the man said. “Believe whatever you want about the bodies! You’ll see if you come this way! They’re all stacked up here!”

  “We can’t use the border. We do not wish to be seen.”

  “Oh, for Christ sake!” the man said. “This is my tunnel.” There were a few moments where the man made shuffling sounds in the dark and sighed. “It’s not a freeway. How many people know?”

  “Only us. We could put in a word with Maid Marian, give you Sherwood privileges.”

  “You don’t even know her.”

  “We work for her.”

  “You’re Rangers?”

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  There was a long pause. Renee listened to the sound of Bea’s breathing and realized meeting a stranger in a dark, earthy tunnel was a sort of nightmare, and wondered why she felt so calm. “This and that,” she said, “administrative.”

  “Will I get clinic access?”

  “Are you sick?”

  “What about school?”

  “You have kids?” Renee didn’t know why she was so surprised, maybe building an elaborate tunnel under your house and having children seem antithetical, and then she remembered her own father and his time down in his wood shop, a two-liter bottle of wine always open on the table saw, tinkering at some project while he quietly sorted and railed against his various demons.

  “How do I know you’re not bluffing?” he said.

  “Goddamnit!” roared Bea. “We can’t hang out in the bottom of this fucking tunnel having an idle fucking conversation all night!”

  “Bea,” Renee said.

  They heard a woman’s voice faintly from somewhere deeper in.

  “We have trespassers,” Nevel said. “Call Bill and Bob downstairs.”

  “Who?” came the woman’s voice and then they heard whispering.

  “Well?” Renee said to Bea. “What the fuck, right?” and then she walked out in front, slowly, toward the sound of the voices. Once she was a few strides beyond Bea’s pen light, if she closed her eyes it was no different than having them open. She wheeled her bicycle forward and stretched her other hand out to steady herself on the walls. “I’m walking forward,” she called.

  She heard Bea cursing her in a whisper behind.

  Renee walked another thirty paces around a curve in the tunnel, until she could sense the couple in front of her somewhere.

  “Who are you?” the woman said.

  “My name is Renee. My friend Bea and I need to come into the city for a little bit. It’s just us and our bikes. We need secrecy. In exchange, we can promise you clinic and school access in Sherwood.”

  There was the light of a flashlight now and Renee followed that to the end of the tunnel. She let them shine it on her, lowering her eyes against the glare.

  “How can you promise that?” the woman asked.

  “You’ll have to take my word on that,” Renee said.

  “I know who you are,” Cora said.

  “You know this woman?” Nevel said.

  “Yes,” Cora said quietly, “I do.” Cora put her hand to her mouth. “Are you in trouble? Can we help?”

  “What?” Nevel shouted. “Who the hell is she?” Nevel squinted at them in the dim light but saw only two women covered in tunnel smudge.

  “Thank you,” Renee said, “we need to find someone in the city.”

  “Come upstairs,” Cora said. “Nevel, you get her bike.”

  “But—but the other girl is back there, with a gun!”

  “No, I’m here,” Bea said, “and hands-off.” She grabbed the bike that had been left against the wall. “You can put your gun away now, tough guy.”

  “This is my tunnel,” Nevel said.

  “Wacko,” Bea said as she passed him. Bea struggled both bikes up the basement stairs and huffed loudly.

  From around his neck, Jamal removed the charm his mother had given him—a tiny metal Guan Yin figure, a small symbol of the disparate paths his parents chose. As his father tread deeper into being a junkie, his mother sifted through religions, thumbing through each as if browsing albums to buy. In the end, she adopted Buddhism. It was no wonder in his mother’s absence Gregor had turned to tea ceremonies, the ritual a sort of communion with his dead wife.

  “Here,” Jamal said, “I brought you something.” He uncurled Rick’s paw-hand and recurled it around the figure of Guan Yin. “Hello?” Jamal said. He nudged Rick’s shoulder. “I put something in your hand.”

  Rick opened one eye and brought the tiny figure in front of it for inspection. “It’s a lady, right? She’s a little lady?”

  “Yeah.”

  Rick brought her closer to his wide bloodshot eye and inspected Guan Yin’s features. “She’s cute,” he said.

  “She’s the Buddhist god of compassion. And mercy.”

  “OK,” Rick said, and closed his eyes aga
in.

  “Hold on to her, you know, for, just hold on to her for now.” Jamal nodded and then the sound of a shot made him jump.

  He crawled back to his window and inspected the street for signs of activity, and then asked Carl if he’d seen anything.

  “I got that yellow house,” Carl called back.

  “You see someone?”

  There was no answer.

  “Carl likes to shoot at things,” Rick said.

  “It’s a house,” Jamal said.

  “That’s a thing.”

  “You hang in there, Rick.” Hours had passed and the strain of it was audible from the other room where Carl had begun to talk to himself in an unceasing whisper. There was no sign of their attackers and Jamal began to fantasize about simply walking out the door and biking home. His calf ached and he was hungry. There were three dead Rangers in the house and he hoped they weren’t going to add a fourth, or more, to the number.

  He pulled out the stack of neighborhood notes and, hunkering in a squat, began to arrange them on the floor according to where the house was positioned in the neighborhood.

  A terrific bang sounded from the room over and Jamal started and lost his balance and disrupted the system of notes he’d laid out.

  “I got the house,” Carl said.