Sherwood Nation

by Parzybok, Benjamin;

  Renee dropped her head and began to do her braids. When she finished she put her palms against her temples. He wished she’d turn around now.

  A wave of impish adolescence overtook him, a handy last resort for fleeing adult troubles and difficult emotional situations. He kicked her, landing a nudging insistent blow to her flank. She turned and gave him an irritated and disgusted look and he kicked her again.

  “The fuck?” she said. She looked hurt and insulted and he kicked her again and then she pulled back and socked him in the thigh.

  “Oh!” he called out and grabbed his leg, which convulsed with pain and then he kicked her again with both feet, strong enough to dislodge her from the edge of the bed.

  “You fucker,” she said and stood up, and before she could walk from the room he leapt up, got his hands around her shoulders and pulled her down on top of him. She struggled to get away and he had to clutch at her back and hold on. She punched him in the side and again in the rib cage but the blows had softened. She took a bite of his shoulder and bit until he hollered out and then she let go and kissed him there and they were still.

  It felt good to have her on top of him, a human blanket.

  “I used to be able to hear birds out my window,” Zach said.

  “Really?” she said, the statement obvious enough to her that she wondered if he was mentioning it as a symbol of some kind in their conversation, or just being nostalgic.

  “Yeah.” He wrapped his arms around her lower back. “It’s complicated, Renee. I would like to be together. But I’m not sure there’s any room for that.”

  She turned and put her head face down on his shoulder, her eyes an inch from the red bite mark there.

  “You know?” he said.

  “I’d like to try again,” she said.

  “But is she up there? Is there a Renee in Sherwood?”

  “I’ll figure it out,” she said. “I’ll make room for it, this relationship. That is what I want. I will make it formal. And in the quiet moments, it will be just Renee and Zach.”

  He didn’t say anything and they lay there until they heard Señor Nombre call out and Bea clunking around and then he said OK.

  Nevel and Cora sat down to watch the morning news with excitement. They had access to Sherwood now and there was a feeling of sudden dual-citizenship, of being able to travel to a paradisiacal island any time they wanted, and so with an extra thrill they sat to watch for any mentions of their new country.

  There was a full-time Sherwood news crew now, a journalist and cameraman. When that night’s Sherwood segment showed, in the microsecond before the journalist spoke, before he knew the camera was running, you could see the grimness of the news on his face.

  They watched and held hands as they saw live footage of Rangers searching houses. Sherwood citizens stood on the streets in their bathrobes as rangers went through their houses, house after house.

  “They searched my house,” a woman who appeared disheveled and agitated said into the camera, and then turned to the journalist who interviewed her uncertainly.

  “And the reason they gave you for the search?”

  “They said they were looking for a fugitive. I had to stand outside while all these green goons went through my house.”

  “I’m very sorry you had to suffer through that. Was anything damaged or taken?”

  “No—” she turned to the camera—“can I take the green goons part back? Can you cut that?”

  After the interview the journalist said they had contacted Maid Marian’s office for comment and received none so far.

  The view switched back to the news anchors, who wanted to know what had happened to the people who were detained.

  The journalist’s picture from a time past appeared in the upper right hand corner of the screen, looking plumper and more innocent, and the anchor faced toward that. “I haven’t heard about anyone detained,” Brian said, “but if there were—there are no jails. So these people would be pulled in to forced labor for the territory, or simply exiled. Sent to live in Portland.”

  “But she wasn’t even there,” Cora said, “right?”

  Nevel sunk into the couch, sensing that their hole into paradise was like a whirlpool in the center of their house, sucking them in. It was their escape hatch there, or their line to the underworld.

  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 puffy 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 s
takes 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.