Sherwood Nation

by Parzybok, Benjamin;

  Renee stood at the window and watched. It was nearing the hours of electricity and the few people on the street hurried toward their destinations. A jeep drove down Fremont and she instinctively crouched. It looked like her territory out there. She wanted desperately to walk back to HQ.

  “Looks like nothing,” she said. “They hit us with a tank and look at this. It’s quiet out there.”

  “We heard a boom in the night—far off, but nobody knows what it was,” Cora said. “I bet you’re both starving—I’ll cook when we have power.”

  The lights flickered on briefly, and then went out.

  “Hey?” Nevel said. “Is that it?”

  Zach held his breath. The news would mean everything.

  Renee paced in front of the television. “They’re going to leave us in the dark, literally.”

  “Renee?” Zach said.

  “People need to know.” She desperately wanted to break something and with great willpower managed not to stomp a Lego battleship that lay on the floor into oblivion.

  She paced around the room once as if looking for an exit, and then sank into the couch. The little girl hovered close and stared, quiet, and Renee looked into her eyes and could fathom only a steadfast inspection. The name Maid Marian had been bandied about in this house, and this girl, she realized, now fixated on the materialization of that name. Here I am in the flesh, Renee thought, with self-hatred. This girl had lived her whole life in the drought. They stared at each other once more. The girl waited to see what the name did, and Renee couldn’t think what that was anymore.

  When she tried to talk to her refugee-hosting family, to this girl, to Zach, only the most microscopic portion of her was available for the task—the rest seethed in a mass of regret and rage. She wanted to see headquarters with her own eyes, pick through the rubble for some sign of hope, to look for those she’d lost. She tried not to think of their names.

  “What?” she said, dimly aware that someone had spoken to her.

  She saw Zach speak to her but the words didn’t register. His mouth moved like a mannequin’s, like something wrong and plastic. Her ears began to buzz and she stood up from where she sat and lurched toward the door. On the front porch she paced the length of it once, thinking that it was only air she needed, a respite from the emotional claustrophobia, but her feet turned down the stairs as if under their own hypnosis. At the street she moved to walk toward Sherwood but the rage in her won out and against all reasonable will to live she turned for downtown, only dimly hearing the calls from Nevel and Cora on the front porch, or the pleading of Zach, who gripped her arm now tightly, asking her to turn back, explaining how she’ll be shot, as if this was something that ought to matter to her. She walked the old borderline of Sherwood toward the city.

  At dawn, Gregor slowly disentangled himself from Maureen. He tucked her into the seat with the army-green wool blanket they’d found in the back and hobbled up the dumpster ramp out to the parking lot. At the top he stopped and leaned on his crutch, overcome with pain. He closed his eyes and waited to get a handle on it.

  At the edge of the lot were the remnants of a border, but no Rangers or Guardsmen to watch over it. He wondered how others had fared in the night.

  He sat on the curb before the entrance to the dead grocery store and waited for the others to arrive. His instinct was to fight. The war was not over until he was dead or the enemy was dead. In previous wars, it had always been the latter. But here the enemy sprawled. The city, the county, the state, and so on, like a fractal each iteration was enclosed by a larger iteration, and in the end his desire for revenge fizzled in the face of the size and unconcern his enemy showed him.

  Perhaps then he could congeal the wrath he needed to exercise to a single person, and inevitably, he thought, that would have to be the mayor. Whether it was he who’d ordered the attack or simply stood by in acquiescence, the mayor felt right as a target.

  He imagined shooting him in the face, perhaps, ending him quickly, marring him, or the stomach to watch him die slowly, while over him he would narrate the future the mayor had robbed them of.

  He couldn’t find a comfortable position for his leg. He tried to move as little as possible.

  In the parking lot several wheelless cars lay like the bones of dinosaurs. They were painted prettily, brightly colored with flowers and trees. On one there was an idyllic scene of deer in a meadow; another had obviously been painted by children, with awkwardly shaped animals on one end and race cars on the other. All complements of the Sherwood volunteer force. Kids had played here as recently as yesterday, at home in their country, naive to the infinite greed of power.

  The sun shone from the east, hot already. In the west there was a bank of clouds, a new dust storm coming in.

  In his front pocket he found his pipe. He smoothed out the dirt on the ground in front of him, clearing a space to etch the plan he hoped would spring forth.

  But the blank slate tired him. He put his pipe in his mouth and leaned back to wait.

  He’d chosen the wrong side of the war to be on. A line of bicycles against tanks.

  The first Rangers began arriving and Maureen joined him. They hunkered in the darkness of the store to avoid being seen as they gathered.

  Gregor sat on a cash register counter and greeted each Ranger as he or she came in with an admixture of tiredness and grief and joy, that they’d come, that they lived. They looked lost and scared and in the end only a small crowd of about thirty amassed. They were motley, young and old, black and white, men and women. The perfect post-apocalyptic ragtag bunch of hangers-on, Gregor thought. These are the people I will lead to death. If there was something else that awaited them he couldn’t think what. But in watching them, Gregor realized he wasn’t sure he cared about the war anymore—these were his people, and like his own children, he just wanted the best for them.

  They spread out and searched through the ransacked building, stepping over previous campsites and other areas where settlers had occupied the building. Being on the border and next to Woodlawn neighborhood, the building was in a gray area and never properly tended to by Sherwood HQ, and so it had stayed abandoned. There were signs of people having lived in the store, but none fresh. Sherwood had found homes for all who’d needed them. They circled about him and shared what news they had. He wished he had some golden offering for them, some shining gem of hope. They talked about Maid Marian and whether she’d died or not, about who else was missing and who had made it.

  “Has anyone seen Jamal?” he asked, but no one had.

  Gregor asked who had children or parents to take care of, and the six who raised their hands he sent home.

  He sat and watched them pack up their bicycles and pedal away, relieved and frustrated to be dismissed. “We can’t have you knowing the plan.” Gregor smiled, covering up, he hoped, the empty room in his mind where a plan should be lodged.

  When it came time for him to speak, he bowed his head and stared at the bandage on his leg. He was silent until he could hear them fidget, until they wondered if the old man had gone to sleep.

  “This is the end of one road,” Gregor said, “and from here we must decide onto which road we will continue.

  “On the one hand, we are defeated. The little dream of Sherwood is dead.” He looked around the room to make sure all had registered this. “I don’t want you to think of Sherwood again—we will not be able to go back there. We have only two choices, two slim, miserable paths from which to choose.”

  He recognized many of Jamal’s Going Street Brigade, their faces hardened by extra training, and he wished his son were among them.

  “We can allow those who control this city to define us. We can attempt to fit in, find ways to hide ourselves, merge back into the city, integrate in disguise. We can bow to that which is imposed on us and suffer under their deceit and muddled management and careless disregard. Times are hard. We hear less and less from the world and one begins to wonder if the world has given up on us. An
d so the city will continue to flail along, squeezing us until the end, when chaos overwhelms all.

  “I don’t want to live that way.” Gregor put both hands over his face, pausing in the speech for emphasis and to give himself time. There was grit and he tasted salt and wondered when the last time he’d bathed was, when the last time he’d fully immersed himself in water. He held a dim memory of pouring a cold ration in a dirty bathtub on a hot day. A year ago? Two years?

  “Our other choice is to impose our own rule. I like to win and this is a war that, in some fashion, we can still win. We know we can do better, right? We have already done better.” Gregor realized every single one of them would be thinking about Maid Marian then, and wondering what could be done without her at their head.

  “We will do what she did,” he said, “but we will not make her mistakes.”

  “Don’t say that,” someone called out.

  Gregor nodded and took note and put his hands in the air to still them. “We would not all be here were it not for Maid Marian, and by here I mean united toward a common goal.”

  There was chattering then, all comparing notes again of the last time they’d seen her and if she was dead and if she wasn’t dead what then?

  “We cannot wait to find her. That none of us have heard means she fled or, I’m sorry to say, was killed. If she fled, we can only hope our actions are a beacon to bring her back.

  “To topple a government is easy,” Gregor said and he could see that he held their attention. They were all his. Despite losing Renee he’d been their general, and they were his for the leading. “All you do is remove the head. You secure the support of those whose support is necessary, and you move faster than your opposition. They did it to us, right?

  “We are criminals. By staying in this room, we are targets waiting for punishment by the powers that be. But though we are small, we are fast. If we take out the head, within a few hours from now we can be the powers that be.” It was such an impossibly ambitious statement that that he could only grin after saying it, and knew that it appeared as a mad confidence.

  There was commotion again then, and a pitch of fear rose up, and he realized he must hurry to keep them.

  “It’s a sad maxim, but winners write history, and as far as I’m concerned, the blank page awaits. And so, my brave soldiers,” he raised his voice, “load your guns! Holster them to your cycles. We ride to city hall in fifteen minutes. For Sherwood!”

  They echoed his last sentence then and seemed to take heart and he turned away and began to prepare, letting them know he was finished. He could hear them move with speed, his words had worked. Perhaps they would take the city back, perhaps they could do some good, but in his mind he knew, at the moment, his only lust was to kill.

  They pooled water and drank, and then stashed what they had left under a pile of garbage. They didn’t know when they’d be coming back.

  Gregor took Maureen’s arm and limped back to the jeep. He would lead them by Jeep, now that he could no longer ride.

  “I’ll take you back to your place,” he said and squeezed across her shoulders. “It’ll be cleared out now.”

  She nodded. “You could come too.”

  He smiled at her. “I’d like that. Very much. Maybe when this is over, but not yet. Someday I would very much like to fade away.”

  Gregor had not been outside of Northeast Portland for nearly two months and he was chagrined at how the other neighborhoods had continued to degrade. Their strange parade, a jeep followed by twenty-six bikes, was watched by serious, hollow-eyed citizens as they passed. A rotten smell of smoke blew along with them, of something burning that should not burn. They came to Fremont and Mississippi, the end of the neighborhoods, with its vantage over a confusion of freeway and office buildings and the city beyond, and Gregor paused. He traced prospective routes from where they’d stopped down the hill to city hall and allowed his mind a moment to wander, to trace out alternate courses of action, to change his mind and let go, set his people free of this death duty. He could return to Maureen’s house. He could show up sheepishly knocking on her door, ask her what she was going to do for the next fifteen years, if she minded having someone around to get old with. Fifteen years? Is that what he had left? Without a family it felt like a marathon of time to chew through.

  The Rangers on their bikes swarmed around the jeep and waited, silent, knowing they were headed into entanglement, afraid and anxious and ready to follow their general into the pit.

  Gregor put the jeep in first gear, wincing as he pressed the clutch with his damaged leg, and rolled down the hill with a small army of cyclists behind. He looked back at them in his rearview mirror and saw again what in a previous life he’d never expected to see: former art students, waitresses, a couple of nappy-haired Jefferson grads barely into their twenties, Iraq war veterans, a mother and father whose child had died, former carpenters, schoolteachers, all of them drought-hardened and trained as Rangers, ready now to follow an old black dog down to city hall to take control of the city or die trying. It was an emotional sight and he had to quickly eject it from his mind or lose confidence in the project all over again.

  There were no checkpoints. They passed a couple of police who looked up from their duties and stared at them, wondering what entity might be riding by them in a National Guard jeep and an entourage of bicycles, but all of the action and chaos was in Sherwood, and they wore no uniforms and were not detained.

  They rode along the east side of what once was called the river but for which now a new name needed coining.

  At the Hawthorne bridge they pointed themselves toward the Portland skyline across the river and paused again.

  “This is a simple plan,” he said, “it’s a desperado’s plan. What you must do to clear your mind, do so now. There will be battle.” It’s a simple speech, too, Gregor thought, wishing he had some charm to give them or a tea ceremony to perform. He looked each of them in the eyes and felt grateful they’d followed him this far. He hoped it was not for nothing.

  He waved his hand forward and drove and they followed over the bridge.

  On the other side they went the three blocks to city hall, driving hard. Two guards were coming out of the building and Gregor skipped the curb and accelerated into them. He crushed one, and winged the other, whom he shot when the guard pulled his gun.

  “Strip their weapons,” he yelled, and then he backed up and accelerated his jeep through the front glass doors of city hall.

  There were six more guards at the security gate inside the doors and Gregor crouched down in the jeep as gunfire peeled about him from all directions. He heard the clatter of bicycles dropping and Rangers pouring in behind him and then the gunfire was over. He lifted his head to see the bodies of the guards being relieved of their guns. Three Rangers were on the floor.

  He wrangled with the door of the crashed jeep until he realized it would not pry open. He crawled over the top with the help of the Rangers, calling out in pain when his leg bumped.

  Two of his Rangers on the floor were already dead; the last lay still and whimpered and he could see from the quantity of blood that she would die in the next few minutes. He put his hand on her head and talked to her, resisting the urge for a mercy killing, which would not be understood.

  “Upstairs, everybody—we can’t hold the door when they come.” He called over one Ranger he knew to be a weak shot and told him to stay with the dying Ranger on the floor until first sight of anyone, and then to follow. Gregor called four Rangers to him and stepped into the antique glass elevator that was at the center of the open building. The doors closed.

  “They have power,” a lanky, serious Ranger named Barbara said.

  “Of course,” Gregor said. “This is city hall.”

  Through the glass of the elevator he watched the rest of the Rangers swarm up the three flights of stairs into the large foyer and felt proud. By the time the elevator door opened there was another gun battle. A pane of glass next to his head
shattered and they crowded out of the elevator and took cover behind a pillar. Guards—city police—were stationed behind other pillars leading up to the entranceway of the mayor’s suites.

  In a show of bravado Gregor hobbled into the fray. He stepped into view and his gun was stripped from him by a bullet gone wide. It spooked him and he ducked behind a pillar. Though uninjured, his hand stung from the blow. One of the Rangers kicked the gun back to him and he saw where it’d been hit, a notch above the grip where he’d held it. He decided to desist from impulsive idiocy.

  Another of the guards was taken out, and two more Rangers were laid out on the floor, one of them screaming and the sound made him sick and mad.

  He could sense the mayor inside. He felt the eagerness of revenge and became impatient.

  Behind them forces would come soon—they’d storm up the stairs just as he had. He needed to finish this and be inside. In a lull between useless gunfire—the guards were under excellent cover and their bullets found no mark either—Gregor borrowed a second gun, one for each hand, and stepped into the hallway again. It was quiet for a moment. The screaming had stopped. Those who’d been dying had died or stopped their howling. All he could hear was his old man’s shuffle, the awkward hobble of an overweight man with a bullet wound in his leg. It was a lonely feeling. For a moment it felt like he was the only one there, as if he were limping down the marbled corridors of a nursing home or hospital, seeking out the nurse’s attention, a catheter in one hand, a Playboy magazine in the other.

  “You are outnumbered. We will not go away. You know how this play ends.” In each hand he held a pistol, and longed for the crutch he’d left behind in the jeep. The leg would not swing forward like he wished. “Give in and live.” Hadn’t he just a moment ago opted against idiocy? Here he was, he nodded wryly, uncaring if this was where he finally fell.