Sherwood Nation: a novel

by Benjamin Parzybok

  Sometime in the night she woke to the green of Zach’s laser pointer criss-crossing across the water tower. When she crossed his green with hers he excitedly began to send Morse code and she had trouble keeping up.

  Watched vid. So sorry about Josh, he signed. After a long pause in which she could think of no response he said: What will you do now?

  She said she didn’t know.

  Wish I were there.

  Come, she said.

  40k gals. Secede.

  What? She signed back, sitting up and trying to blink the sleep out of her eyes.

  City not distribution. Bargain with feds. Make your own country.

  Don’t understand. She said.

  Human rights.

  Zach. I don’t understand.

  Your own country. Take NE. Be up soon as I can.

  How? She said.

  Riot.

  Renee sat with the laser pointer in her lap and let Zach’s last word echo through her. For a brief moment she imagined herself as a sort of prime minister, her people stretched out before her in old Portland bungalow houses as far as the eye could see, all of them her charge to protect and care for, and then the weight of such an enterprise leveled her again, so that she flattened out on the playground equipment and shivered in the virtual company of Zach. He was joking, surely.

  Ha ha, she blipped back.

  Riot. Borders. Negot. H2o dist. Security force. Only way to stay out of jail.

  Right, she said. She could tell he was on fire there on his roof across town, humming with ideas. Not me. No way it would work, she signed.

  You have the reputation to do it. So bold it would throw them.

  Crazy.

  Yes. Big crazy. Stay out of jail.

  She rested her eyes for a moment, exhausted, and continued to see the stark, ultra-bright light of the laser through her eyelids. In her dreams, the racing green line traced out an outline of neighborhoods, seven miles square. A map. When she woke it was still dark and she had no concept of what time it was. Her body was sore from lying across the wood playground equipment, and the water tower had gone dark. She eased herself up, traced out a quick bye love, and walked home.

  At HQ she stood outside the big garage and tried to make up her mind. Inside was her new truck. She nodded to the guard posted outside and went in. Standing with her hand on the truck’s great swollen belly, she felt like a dragon must, counting her pile of gold, the war spoils. The space felt cooler, the great mass of the tank changing the climate of the room.

  They had filled a number of unit gallons from it, and she drank deeply from one of these now. She drank recklessly, not counting gulps, not heeding the digital readout.

  She thought about the number of people who had died to bring it here. In her mind the water mass of them, the blood weight, was roughly equal to the contents of the tank. When Jamal had first pulled it into the garage, before she knew Josh had died, it was the most glorious of moments. Like life had just begun for them. There were many in her care now. They were at war: against the city’s neglect and scorn, against the drought, against their own nature.

  With the water they had an immense wealth. She could sustain innumerable lives. She could use it as an agent of change.

  “Sometimes people have to die,” she said to the empty room to try it out. A wave of nausea hit her so that she braced herself with the truck, let her head rest against its belly.

  It was a lie and it was not a lie.

  Tomorrow they would empty the contents of the truck into tanks they’d built in preparation in the backyard. Then they would disappear this unlucky truck, with its bullet holes and blasted-out windshield and the role it had played in their cause.

  She patted the side and felt the dampness below its plugged holes.

  She would recruit more, she thought. They would expand. They would go out on bikes, weighted down with a cargo of unit gallons, repaying with life the debt she owed.

  That night they hunkered close about the campfire in the backyard, quieter than usual. Jamal sat across from Renee, and she avoided his eyes, knowing now what she’d put him through. She had apologized until he’d asked her to stop.

  “You can’t do that again, dude,” Bea said, referring to how Renee had disappeared.

  Renee scanned the faces at the fire—beside Bea and Jamal, Leroy and a few others were there, their heads bowed toward the heat. “I went to the towers and talked to Zach.”

  Bea grunted.

  “He says we should secede. Went on and on about it. He used to be all cautious before. He’s worried I’ll go to jail.”

  Across from her, Jamal fixed her with a peculiar stare and she smiled nervously and stared at the fire again. She didn’t feel herself. She should go to bed, she knew, start again in the morning.

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” Jamal said.

  “Hm,” Bea said.

  “Can you imagine?” Renee said. “Might as well stand at the bottom of the mountain and holler the avalanche down.”

  “Renee,” Jamal said, “that’s exactly what we need. New rules. New police. City out of here. It’s fucking genius. You got to do that.”

  “I have to do that? I’m building a neighborhood support network. I don’t want to be mayor.”

  “Mayors don’t run countries, you’d be like queen or something.”

  “Fetch Queen Marian some pie,” Renee sing-songed. She pulled a handful of sticks from the wood pile behind her and methodically snapped them and fed them to the fire.

  “I’d vote for you,” Bea said

  “Bea,” Renee said. “You’re supposed to be the rational mind.”

  “Never thought I’d say this, but I agree with Jamal and Zach.”

  “Yep,” Leroy said. There was a moment of silence, and then he added: “Their rule is an agreed-upon system for the maintenance of order and the continuation of services. The services have all gone, but the government wants to go on anyway. And yet the representative nature of democracy means it’s too hard to course correct when the situation calls for it.”

  “Hear, hear,” the woman sitting next to Leroy said, whom Renee noticed was holding hands with Leroy.

  Renee smiled at Leroy and he shrugged and looked away shyly.

  “City isn’t even here, but their shadow is,” Jamal said, appraising Leroy in a new light. “Chase it out.”

  “Listen. Someone else can. I don’t want to do that. We already lost one person, are you guys not seeing what would happen? We have a good plan.”

  Jamal put his legs behind him and lay prone on the grass, his chin resting in his hands. “You’re not seeing it. Think about it. You’ve already got a robust neighborhood network. Work with rations distribution, make it safe, do all the stuff you’re doing already—just with scale, and with everyone in, and no outside government to fuck with us. Like I was saying at the start. It’d be powerful. You’re already partway there—it’s got to be you.”

  Renee leaned back and looked up at the stars and began to shiver. As the night wore on she heard them get up to go, one by one.

  “Come on, let’s go to bed, your highness.” Bea stood over her and offered her hand.

  Renee snorted and stayed where she was.

  “Come on, I’m teasing.”

  “I’ll be up shortly, love,” Renee said.

  After a while she was alone. The fire died next to her. A breeze came and she wrapped her arms around herself and stared into the sky. The stars tilted and turned, until they’d traced their way across the black expanse and went to rest at its brim, replaced by new ones along the other edge. A few shooting stars blazed white and were gone. What journeys they’d had, she thought, born in some distant part of the galaxy. Perhaps birthed in the time of Tiberius Gracchus or Hypatia, or
earlier, when the Earth was wild, hundreds of thousands of years ago. All of them, the meteors and the Gracchi and Hypatia, they burned bright and came to unpleasant ends. Still, she could see how it was a time for which ambition was called. A chaos through which order could be made. Finally the dawn came and the stars faded away and the sky filled with blue.

  Among the meetings Gregor had lined up for the day was one with a woman who called herself Maid Marian. He’d seen her on the news, but for the most part he assumed it was white people trouble.

  Some days back she had “requested” an interview with him at her place up in the Cully neighborhood, and he’d stared at the written card with puzzlement. At the bottom of the note was a different handwriting: Please come, Pop—Jamal. He wondered if Jamal had found the card and used it for scratch paper. And then he forgot about the whole affair. Come to her place—If you did not understand that there was a certain order to the universe, you did not warrant a reply.

  And now he’d been informed she was coming for a visit. He sighed heavily and shifted in his chair. It was trouble, he could feel it.

  Gregor had a crew of twenty and ran the Woodlawn and King neighborhoods. His operation was diminished significantly from the old days, the drug war, but it was what he needed. When he had it, he dealt what there was to his dealers and a few freelancers—dope, crack, coke, heroin, ecstasy and if the white kids came looking for it he could turn up LSD. It was harder to obtain nearly all those, but the demand was high. It was a tightly run operation. He’d been running the ship for a little over two decades and he felt like he’d mellowed into a relationship with the neighborhoods, his business clean and efficient, a regality of sorts. The reputation he’d earned over the years far outsized the operation he ran now, and far surpassed the borders of his domain, and that was fine with him. He thought of himself as the standards body, and his structure provided the DNA for every other operation within miles. When the others needed advice, they came to him.

  He was lenient when leniency was called for, hard when hardness was called for. In a word: Just. Nobody had been killed on his account in the last five years, and there’d been no police trouble for three, and so he’d begun to think of it as “just a business, like everybody else.” The peaceful success had a few side effects: a Buddha-sized paunch—though shrunken somewhat from the drought—diminishing ambition, and a tendency to lapse into nostalgia. The Woodlawn–King War had taken his wife and the youngest of two sons. Jamal was all he had left. Perhaps that had mellowed him, too.

  Over time Gregor had earned a host of nicknames, a few of which were tolerable, and a number that he loathed.

  “The Pirate” had a nice ring to it. It suggested, perhaps, that he was able with a sword or might possess a prosthetic limb, likely hollowed out, with some devilish map encased inside. It suggested he might have exclusive knowledge of a buried chest of treasure somewhere.

  “The Hammer” he didn’t care for. It was given to him because of a rumor that he’d beaten a man to death with a hammer. Occasionally a hammer would be left on his doorstep, which he supposed was some weak-minded threat against him by the family or friends of the victim. ‘The Hammer’ sounded brute and haphazard, the weapon of dullards.

  “The Arm” was marginally better. There was a hint of reach and length about it that he liked. Though when he thought of the name, it was difficult for him not to evoke a teeming mass of arms, thin ones and strong ones and tattooed ones and fat ones and all those arms together, jumbled and sweaty in their fleshiness—appropriate for some kind of commercial about human diversity, sure, but it seemed entirely the wrong kind of message he hoped to project for himself.

  He hated “Spider.” Something about webs and conspiracies. He had a deep arachnophobia and checked his shoes each morning and needed to look in any darkened space—a glove box, a sock drawer—before pulling an item out. No matter that he was told one had to face one’s fears. It was Batman’s fear of bats, after all, that made him what he was. Well. Not for him.

  There were a number of names that suggested generosity in some vague way, or that he was the source of something. The father, dealer, the giver, the bank. All true, in some way. Simple words to describe a simple function. Honorable enough, but boring.

  His favored nickname was simply “Pop,” and it was what his men called him. There was a fatherly tone to it. In his mind it was written comic style, the pop! of a gun or simply the sound of something becoming suddenly unstuck and free.

  When Maid Marian arrived with an amazon of a woman and Leroy, he did what he always did when he had a visit. He made tea. The making of tea in these times was an exorbitant and troublesome affair, but Gregor appreciated ritual and protocol and what it said about a person. No matter the circumstances or purpose of the visit, when you came calling at his house you were going to drink tea. He kept a number of gallons stashed away expressly for the purpose. In the past it had been bourbon or rum, but a man could not quietly sustain his affairs for two decades on that kind of a ritual, especially if he preferred not to have the complications of bloodshed in his house. This he had learned.

  “We’ve come to negotiate,” Maid Marian said, after she told him her plan to take control of the entire Northeast of Portland and to secede from the city government. He’d had to ask her to speak up. His ears weren’t what they used to be, and he’d noticed that the nervous dribbled their sentences into wispy puffs of air at the ends.

  When she repeated herself her voice rang out with a bold certainty. Gregor stopped pouring tea. He wondered if he was being had. He turned to Leroy for clarification and noticed that the man had picked up an empty ashtray and now spun it end over end in his hands at a speed that could only suggest he’d spent the better portion of his life practicing just such a move. Leroy looked up at him and shrugged and continued with his spinning.

  “You’re inside the city,” Gregor said and handed out the cups. “You can’t secede with a few piddly neighborhoods. You’ve got no services, no power source, no water.”

  “Water is supplied by the federal government and run by the National Guard. We will negotiate as a separate entity. The Northeast sits over the aquifer, what’s left of it, and a couple of wells will be within our domain. They say there’s a little that can be had there if we can dig deep enough.”

  “So.” Gregor scratched his head and took a sip of his tea and then made eye contact with his men to make sure they were alert—they were bodyguards, really, but he felt there was a physical intimacy to the word which made him uneasy about using it. “So, you are here to—what are you here for?” He suddenly felt like ten years of success had made him go soft, that there were large new ideas at play that hadn’t yet scuttled their way into his dusty spiderweb.

  “We want you to be part of the organizational structure.”

  Gregor made eye contact with one of his men again, this time to register disbelief.

  She nodded to affirm what she’d said. “Your son is already with us.”

  ‘Well, the boy does what he wants to do. Listen, I’ve peaceably cohabited with many other organizations, of all makes, for over a decade. I don’t run in turf wars, not if I don’t have to.”

  “That’s what I’ve been told. I’m not bringing a war here, I’m asking that you bring your operation into the folds of ours, and then to expand your duties. Your”—and he saw her struggle for a word here—“concern, at the very least, will remain yours.”

  Gregor made the kind of sound those in charge learn to make, meaning: I will need to hear more before I say no, but no it will likely be.

  “I need leaders in the government.”

  Gregor studied his tea. There were leaves swirling about the top of it, suggestively, and for the hundredth time he wished he could draw some meaning from them. “You know what business I’m in?”

  Maid Marian nodded. “I do, and one of the thin
gs I would ask is that we put some safety controls on the more addictive drugs. But right off the bat, legalization would take out a good deal of future conflict.”

  “Huh.” Gregor smiled and leaned back into his chair. He held his tea with both hands, enjoying the feel of the rough cup and the quiet affluence of it. “Lady, I think,” he said and paused. “I think you are operating in a fantasy. I need this business to be here at the end of all this. What do you hope to accomplish with a secession? You’re suggesting a sort of suicide. These are not end-times, this is not the apocalypse.”

  “Not yet!” She stood.

  Gregor was impressed with her brazenness, even as his men leaned in.

  “That’s what I’m trying to avoid,” she said. “You’ve had riots in your neighborhood. How many houses burned down? You know how hard it is to put out a fire. There’s not a single occupied government building in the entire Northeast. When’s the last time you saw a police vehicle? The city has abandoned this quadrant. I know you’ve stepped up security in your neighborhoods. When will they cut rations entirely? We’re fighting for survival here—maybe not you, but most are. This entire section of the city is going to fall into complete chaos. How can that help your business? The proposal I’m making to the city is simply that we handle security and water distribution, and perhaps we’ll pick up a few other services along the way if they fit.”

  “Sit. Sit down. Let’s talk at least. You’re talking about security again—what about the others?”

  “Other what?”