Sherwood Nation: a novel

by Benjamin Parzybok

  An hour later when she came back in to clear glasses and see if anything was needed, Gregor appeared to be telling a joke.

  “A robber breaks into a house, right? It’s at night. He sneaks his way upstairs to where they’re sleeping. He points his gun at the couple in their bed. And he says, ‘I’m going to kill you. I’m going to kill you both. But first I have to know your names, I don’t kill anyone without knowing their name.’ He puts the gun to the woman’s head and says ‘Tell me your name!’”

  Bea involuntarily clutched the front of her shirt and wondered if some elaborate metaphorical threat were being made. She looked at Renee, who wore the expression of someone being told a joke, expectant and skeptical.

  “She’s half-dead with fright already, but she says ‘My name is Marguerite.’”

  “‘Oh no,’ the robber says, ‘oh no! Goddamnit. That’s my mother’s name.’ He’s seriously put out here. ‘I can’t kill someone with the same name as my mom.’”

  Gregor paused in his telling to take a swallow of water. Then he took his right hand, which clutched an unlit smoking pipe, and jabbed the pipe stem like a gun barrel toward an imaginary man’s head.

  “‘How about you,’ the robber says.”

  “The man is shaking, his teeth are chattering. ‘My name is Eddy, but-but my friends all call me Marguerite.’”

  Renee guffawed once and Bea felt weak, and like she had to get out of the room immediately. As she collected glasses and fled, she heard Renee say, “Exactly. See? Exactly.”

  At last they exited Renee’s office together. Gregor had his arm across Renee’s shoulders and to Bea it looked strange there, a powerful brown arm, Maid Marian and the local mafia. But as they chatted she watched them. If you didn’t know who they were, she thought, you might consider them workers in a community center, or perhaps a government agency, co-workers posing for a photo.

  “Tomorrow then?” Renee said.

  Gregor pulled away and slapped his hand against a sheaf of handwritten paper. “Tomorrow we build,” he said, and then he pointed his pipe stem at Bea, as if to say you heard it here first, or be there or be square, or as the romans do, or you’re tall, girl, or some other pointless expression she was sure he’d intended.

  When he was gone, Bea asked what’d happened. She saw Renee’s eyes glow like close planets, each a shade different than the other, a trick of light perhaps.

  Renee hugged her. “It went so much better than expected. He’s perfect. An enterprise needs a partner.”

  Over several grueling days, Jamal, Gregor, and Bea interviewed every single volunteer that had showed up at Maid Marian’s house on Going Street. The number had swelled to over three hundred. They listened to them explain why they wanted to be a Ranger, wrote down their experiences and skills, and put them through aptitude tests. Forty were singled out.

  And this, too, Gregor and Renee argued about. Just as they had for the last three days about every detail that crossed their mutual paths, discovering in whose hands the power lay. They argued about the style of the uniforms being made, about how this new security force would be armed, about where water went or who would be put in charge, about how to deal with every other person of power in the neighborhood.

  On the night of the second day of argument Renee realized she’d made a horrible mistake. A man who has spent his life in control cannot cede control to others. She should have raised someone else into the role, made Jamal her general, perhaps, or not him either, forget the whole family. She could not go to sleep. Under her covers she shook with rage and wished she were done with the whole affair. It was a stupid idea. Zach was an idiot, Gregor was nothing but a criminal. But Josh, she thought, thinking of his body in the grave in the backyard, could have helped, or was she romanticizing the dead now? Bea snored like a bear and she felt rage at her too. “Bea,” she called out. She stretched her foot across her mattress and onto Bea’s and gave a kick that woke her friend.

  “Come on,” Renee said, deciding in that instant what she must do. She gave another kick. “Follow me.”

  Gregor had been sleeping in his office at HQ, sending his men to his home for supplies. It was here that Renee went. She knocked at the door with a hard, angry rap and the sound echoed down the quiet hallway. She brushed her hair from her face and prepared to charge in. She’d tell him what she thought of him. Tell him it was over.

  When a sound came from inside she threw the door wide. He was not in his bed. The bed was not even there, but stored still in the closet where it spent the day. He was sitting behind his desk, fully dressed, his pipe hand poised to tap. She wondered if he’d been sleeping at all.

  He waved her in. Just you, he told her, signaling Bea should wait outside, and Renee nodded her assent.

  “I know why you’re here,” he told her. He lit a candle on his desk with a match and signaled that she sit in the chair across from him. He smiled at her then, a charming smile so devoid of anger it sapped some of hers. He stroked at his beard, gray and black, and cut sporadically, she supposed, with scissors. The candle caught his eyes so that they reflected the light, they glowed a reddish brown.

  “Listen, I know why you’re here,” he said again. “I’m frustrated too, but I’ve been thinking about it non-stop.”

  Renee swallowed and nodded. She felt like standing, and then did so, pacing back and forth in front of the desk with her hand on her mouth, her other gripping her elbow.

  He stood and pointed at her with his pipe. “You’re in charge,” he said. “I do not wish to run this.”

  She nodded again and felt how close they’d been to the edge of it, and for a moment her intense desire to eject him from her house reversed entirely, so that she suddenly wanted to embrace him, to thank him for saving them both with his moment of graciousness.

  “Look,” he said, and pointed to the wall where a uniform was hung, in the exact style she had specified. It was beautiful and she loved it.

  She knew what to do then. “I’ll write us a contract,” she said. “A document meant for you and me. The assurances I can make, what you and I each decide, everything. In the morning, we’ll discuss and finalize it. Agreed?”

  He nodded his head, tapping the stem of his pipe into his palm. “Yes. Do that.” He smiled again and she realized that she had to make it work, that the relationship was hers to make or destroy.

  The chosen forty would be specially trained and put in Jamal’s charge. They would carry weapons. Several were assigned to Maid Marian guard duty—others would be a special task force for crime prevention, border protection, or to train other rangers.

  The feeling of his new command exhilarated Jamal and made him—against all expectations—more afraid.

  At night as he lay in bed a wash of fear would rise up through him, as if the ground had suddenly fallen away beneath him. With a conscious effort he’d try to get to the root of it. Of all the fears: the fear of going hungry or thirsty, of living like an outlaw, of command and responsibility, of his father, fears from the past—that sickening and thrilling fear when you’ve been ordered to kill someone, buried nonsensical fears, their origins deep in his childhood, it was the fear around his Going Street Brigade that caused him the most concern. It was like owning a giant cannon, he thought. At first you felt safe, protected by the giant, manly monstrosity, and then, because of that weapon, you knew you were seen, and the necessity to live up to the object’s potential overwhelmed. At some point you would have to level its awesome firepower at something, and whatever you fired at would fire back.

  He wondered if his father had ever experienced this. Perhaps this is what caused him to go to war in the first place. The simple ownership of soldiers necessitating their violent use.

  In the mornings, he stood in front of them in the back field, training. They were always training, he thought, and it was his doing, his to c
ontrol. He worried they would not be ready.

  He was comfortable in front of them—he’d led the small gang of his father’s in King neighborhood. In the Going Street Brigade there were twenty-eight men and twelve women, and nearly every one had more combat experience than he had. They’d fought in wars or had martial arts training or boxing or had been in a gang. One of the women had been a city cop, and it had been a difficult decision to bring her on. She lived nearby and the allure of Maid Marian and disgust with the city had pulled her from the force.

  The newly formed Going Street Brigade ranged in age from twenty-four to sixty. The sixty-year-old, a man named Hugh, was slower and out of shape, and Jamal worked at him, curious to figure out what he was capable of.

  “He’s not an old man, Jamal,” his father said. “I’m sixty four.”

  “Well,” Jamal said and shrugged. “Join the elite force then.”

  “No,” Gregor scoffed, “I hear it’s run by some kid.”

  “A kid wonder.”

  “Mm. Kid blunder maybe.”

  “Yeah. Thanks, Pop. We’ll be out here at six a.m., you old shit, if you can handle it.”

  “I could handle it.”

  “Yeah?” Jamal raised an eyebrow in challenge.

  Gregor dropped the bundle of papers he held with a slap on his desk. “I’ve got real work to do here, son. Why don’t you go play with your pals.”

  “Will do,” Jamal said, and backed from the room, his arms flapping like that of a chicken. “Bawk, bawk.”

  Hugh, the sixty-year-old, had fought in two wars by the time he was twenty-six, both times against guerrilla forces in urban environments. Jamal prayed like hell they weren’t preparing them for a war, but the man knew what he was doing. He had skills they needed. After the wars, Hugh had spent thirty years as a high-school chemistry teacher.

  “You sure you want to be in the combat unit?” Jamal asked him in private. “I don’t want to step on any toes, but we could definitely find you a different job.”

  “Yes sir,” Hugh said. His face was hard and set but his eyes were complex, tree rings, Jamal thought, layers of previous wars and a new war. He was shorter, and his shoulders were big and hunched, his head sticking above like a turtle’s from its shell.

  Jamal thought of how he must have disciplined his students with chemical equations and repressed a shudder.

  Hugh saluted, the motion brisk and all elbow. His fingers a poised karate strike against his cheek.

  Not being from a military background, it amused him to see how they each showed respect for their superiors from whatever experience they had. Many soldiers fell into the comfort of military protocol, but others—say Preston, a big kid with hair scissor-cut to the scalp and a ring of tattoos around his neck, a black belt in Aikido and a fondness for practical jokes, bowed comically to Jamal. In some cases, Jamal enforced a formality, in others he was lenient. When bowed to, he bowed back.

  Ten years back, when he was eighteen, Jamal had gotten his first action in the war between drug houses. Another dealer had tried taking over the east side of Gregor’s territory and six of them had been sent to scare the other dealer off. Only Jamal and one other came back that day. They’d underestimated, and by the end of the month half of all of Gregor’s crew had been killed, including his older brother. The neighborhood shuttered themselves in and locked their doors and the police cruised the streets in their cars, too afraid to set foot on a blacktop painted with blood.

  To Jamal’s surprise, Gregor showed up for six a.m. training wearing ugly teal sweat pants and a T-shirt, fitted tight over the Liberty Bell of his belly. Jamal could feel his troops tense. Those who had military training stood at attention, and the others followed. Here was their general, in his gaudy glory. Jamal wondered what his father was trying to get at.

  “Sir,” Jamal said, “do you think we could talk in private for a moment?”

  Gregor trotted toward the back of the lineup, “No, I do not.”

  “But—”

  “Proceed!” Gregor said over the heads of the Going Street Rangers. “Some asshole called me ‘old’ yesterday.” There was nervous laughter among the troops.

  “Pop . . .”

  When Gregor was properly in formation, he saluted and waited stoically.

  “All right. All right, people. Let’s do this,” Jamal said.

  The mayor was home, finally, from a day that would not end, a series of meetings strung together like purgatory popcorn necklaces. The day had given him headaches that piled on top of each other, stood on each other’s shoulders, achieving what before it no other headache had achieved. Mayor Brandon Bartlett limped to the sofa and slumped into it and did not move.

  “Hard day, love?”

  “Nnh.”

  “Sorry.”

  The mayor heard Christopher’s progress about the room but could not be bothered to open his eyes, even as the footsteps approached.

  “Fancy a diversion, then?”

  The mayor opened one eye and observed Christopher’s hand holding a slim, hand-rolled cigarette. “Is that?”

  Christopher bit his bottom lip and nodded yes, his eyebrows raised.

  “Yes,” the mayor said. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  The mayor stood up and pumped one elbow behind him. “Oh my god, yes. How in the hell?”

  “He has his ways.” Christopher shrugged. “He can get, when he wants.”

  “He is a savior is what.”

  “To the balcony, monsieur?”

  “After you, my friend.”

  Like two high-schoolers, the mayor thought, with their hands cupped over the flame, a dusty wind scraping into the fourth-floor balcony. With the first inhale he had a coughing fit and could not stop, but it was a gleeful, barking cough, his lungs burning and the taste in his mouth pleasant. With his nose he chased the wispy trail of secondhand smoke, vacuuming it up, which made Christopher laugh.

  When it was finished they watched a deep red lava-bubble where the sun descended from the sky. The mayor leaned into the concrete edge of the balcony and watched, looking over his city as its gray haze transformed first into a dusty golden cityscape, and then an umber quilt. He still loved it, right? The place he governed, and the job itself?

  Pretty much, he thought. Yeah.

  “There’s this woman—” the mayor said and stopped. He could picture her face as if it were there in front of him. He closed his eyes and saw her, dressed inevitably in head-to-toe blue, blue blouse and blue jeans, or a long blue jeans dress, with eyebrows as if made of cat fur, long curly brown hair, a shade of lipstick that never seemed right—too brown or too pale. She and her husband manifested everywhere he went now. He, the husband, gray-haired and short, covered himself almost entirely in political bumper stickers and the mayor wondered at the mechanics of that. His whole body a collage of protest snippets. Was it the same outfit, or did the man have an unlimited supply? They were his heckling regulars, the oddball standouts in every crowd of impassioned protestors. The husband always the first to lead a cheer of Heartless Bartlett, or to call out in opposition to any bland thing he might take a stance on. But her: She never said anything. She simply watched him, and when he met her eyes, she smiled. Weirdly, he’d come to think of her as who he most wanted to please. The protester’s wife, less shrill and more dedicated, dressed in blue; expectant. Waiting for him to do right. Perhaps she was his biggest fan, and her husband his most fervent detractor, the mayoral office the dividing battle line they’d chosen in their marriage. He wondered about sending an emissary right now out into the city to find her and bring her here. It would be nice for them to sit across the table from each other and she could smile at him, with her small mouth and big cat eyebrows. Constituent, he could say, Leader, she would reply. They would shake hands. On a piece of p
aper he would draw up all of his plans for her, they’d sprawl across it like mathematical equations that she would find brilliant. He would make changes for her, listen to her reasoned advice. Then . . .

  Oh I am so stoned, he realized suddenly. He looked into the distance and smiled. For a moment, looking out over the darkening city he felt like embracing it, a man lonely on a platform, ready to hug the thing he stewarded. For that was what he was: janitor, nursemaid, protective father. It seemed entirely unfair that he was of mortal stature. He should be a hundred feet high, with a skyscraper-sized broom for housekeeping duties. He would walk the streets with great footfalls, bom bom bom, sweeping it free of drought detritus, sweep right into the Northeast where he could feel them plotting against him. Big dust blooms blowing out in front of his broom.

  “You OK there?” Christopher said.

  “Me? Hey, yes,” the mayor said. He reached out and grabbed Christopher’s hand and smiled. “Hell yes.”

  Somewhat later they went to bed and had sex and then in the dim moonlight lay on their backs, their eyes wide open, staring upward. After a long period of post-coital contentment and silence, they had one more conversation that went something like:

  Mayor: Mmbop.

  Christopher: Beep beep.