Sherwood Nation: a novel

by Benjamin Parzybok

  They arrived as an armed mass of bicycles, thirty strong plus Maid Marian and Bea. They shared sparse, giddy words with each other as they dismounted and filtered between the dead trees of Irving Park in the dusk-light, and wondered if they were going to their deaths. At the far end of the park the contrast between the two groups became clear. They wheeled their bikes toward a Lincoln Town Car surrounded by police cars.

  The police were better armed and better trained, but in the dim light up close the Green Rangers were an unknown. To the police there was a mysterious and threatening quality about this new, strange army. They kept no formation and blended into the park. It was difficult to know how many there were. But most of all, they fought for something still mystifying and vague, under the guidance of her, deeply unnerving the mayor’s force.

  Beforehand, Jamal had struggled with a way to holster their weapons, and it’d made him feel like an asshole that in their first meet-up with another force, even this they had barely worked out. In the end they settled on a thigh holster made of a canvas sail scavenged from someone’s garage and sewn into shape by volunteers. It worked well enough. As he squatted behind a dead tree he gripped his gun against his leg, steady in its pouch. He was close enough to put a bullet in somebody. He looked up into the tree cautiously. You never knew when one would spontaneously shed a branch.

  The door of the Town Car swung open and from inside the backseat the mayor beckoned.

  “Don’t do it,” Bea whispered hoarsely at Renee as they approached on foot with an escort of two rangers, while the rest took up positions.

  Renee patted her friend’s arm. “Don’t worry.”

  Renee climbed into the backseat and closed the door behind her. Bea stood uncomfortably outside the car, huddled with the other two rangers, exchanging size-up looks with the police who stood nearby in the reflected glare of headlights.

  In the backseat the mayor turned sideways and scooted backwards. The car felt unreasonably small with Maid Marian in it beside him. She smelled of sweat and dirt and looked at him now with intent, grim eyes and he could feel himself on the verge of sputtering, whereas moments ago his imagination had him dominating this encounter.

  She held out her hand and he shook it. “Maid Marian,” he said.

  “Nice car,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said, and then realized he should have brought her something to drink, or something, anything to put between them. You wined and dined foreign nationals, did you not?

  “This can end without a fight,” he tried. “You could run a volunteer force, a neighborhood association, and we wouldn’t interfere and . . . ” The mayor folded his hands in his lap, and then unfolded them and rested his elbow on the headrest, in a position of greater control but less comfort.

  “It’s already done,” Renee said.

  “Not at all,” he said.

  “Listen. We went through all of your options.” She held up her fingers to tally off his detractors. “Between the U.S. Humanitarian Aid Act, my popularity, the riots, your forces which hardly have free time on their hands, the water grafting you’ve done—don’t,” she said and held her other hand up to keep him from interrupting, “—and the unrest in the rest of the city—you don’t have any options. Cede control. I’m sitting on a time bomb.”

  For a brief moment he lost track of what she’d been saying as she rattled off his problems with easy fluency. It reminded him immediately of what it had been like to fight with his mother, who had battered at him with unending lists of data. As his mind came out of its anxious reverie he found her last phrase rattling around his mind like a marble in a tin bucket. “Time bomb?” he said.

  She handed him an address on a piece of paper. “The trucks will enter here. Please make sure there are no city personnel nearby.”

  “The trucks?”

  “Distribution, obviously.”

  “The Guard?”

  She nodded, and he could see she was playing her ace.

  “There’s no way. The Guard is not going to be delivering water to your enclave-thing.”

  “Already worked out.”

  He took the paper and stared at it and was unable to read anything it said, his eyes blurring and his face burning. He didn’t know what she was talking about in regards to the Guard and he realized the meeting had gone horribly off track. “You’ve got city government and the U.S. government to contend with. You can’t seriously think you can run a country inside of a city. You’ve got twenty-four hours to—”

  “The U.S. government?” There was a scornful sarcasm in her voice.

  He’d known it was a bad tactic as he’d said it. The U.S. government was nothing but a provider of bare-necessities aid, much of it funneled from other nations. They had little influence west of the Rocky Mountains, only a moral duty, which they nominally fulfilled. They could give a damn about a micro-secession. Their local representation, the National Guard, he was supposedly in charge of, or in cahoots with, though he was regularly being reminded otherwise.

  “Let’s be clear.” Maid Marian leveled her gaze at him. “It’s me and you.” She jabbed one thin, dirty finger in the air at him, attached to, he couldn’t help but notice, a nicely shaped hand. “I plan to be a good neighbor. How about you?”

  “It is not only me, the city council—”

  “Don’t even bring up the council.”

  “We’re a democracy. You’re playing with human lives!” the mayor protested.

  She stared hard at him. “Spoken like a true glass house dweller. I’m heading to a news interview, anything else?”

  “No!” he hollered. He saw a policeman’s face loom large out his window and he waved him away. “Don’t go.” She had one leg out the car door and he grabbed her arm. “Do not split the population of this city. Why not be a whole unit, why not solve our problems together?” he said, finding his voice finally. “You don’t want there to be a civil war, Maid Marian.”

  “I don’t see us solving our mutual problems any time soon. I’m going to take this problem off your hands and run a tight, well-functioning nation in place of your chaos and shitty leadership.”

  “Don’t go,” he said. “Please.”

  “We’ll negotiate for other services with the private enterprises that run them.”

  “Please—”

  “Let go of my arm,” Maid Marian growled.

  “But aren’t you scared?” he said. “To be doing this? To be in charge of this many people?”

  He could see the anger in her face, how she would have liked to sock him in the nose. She dipped her head and studied the seat between them and he released her arm. It was quiet in the car. “If I were you,” she said finally, “I would be terrified.”

  After a moment she left, closing the door behind her. It was dark now and he watched her shadowy form walk back into the trees with her people, her hair glistening in the headlight beams. Like some fucking wood nymph. He bunched his fist and punched the headrest. Then he opened the door and called his advisors back in.

  The mayor had acquired a copy of Maid Marian’s letter to the residents of Sherwood and the paper burned in his hands. The news channel had given it to him as a courtesy before they aired its contents. He circled his couch with it, waiting for Christopher to wake up from his nap. Christopher would know what to do. Together they could craft a response—he could go on the news—during the weather—with a brilliant speech. He would guffaw with scorn at their water taxes and her plea to give her a week of faith. Faith! Next she would be expecting them to sacrifice virgins to her.

  He flattened out the letter on the table that overlooked the city and self-consciously glanced up toward Sherwood, as if she could see him standing there, obsessing over her letter. Then he looked toward the bedroom door again. Christopher was sleeping his fucking life away.

 
He eased open the door to the room and saw Christopher’s form in the sheets. His lips parted slightly as he slept. The last few years had aged him. Drought years, years he’d been mayor, hard years on anyone. Still, the beauty of the man he’d first met was present, on his face, but also in the mayor’s mind. Those first impressions of Christopher from years ago etched deeply enough so that when he looked at his partner’s face, years of memories overlaid themselves on top, and he saw his partner in two worlds, young and happy, and older now, married to the mayor.

  The mayor put his hand on Christopher’s hip but he remained deep in sleep. The feel of that hip under the sheet, still sharp and interestingly contoured, lean after all this time, was arousing. That and, for some goddamn reason, Maid Marian’s letter. Crumpled and flattened on the table where he’d left it. Its message bore implications of his own impending doom, so that all there was left for a man was carnal indulgence.

  He stripped his clothes off and crawled into bed and pressed his lips to the back of his partner’s neck and inhaled. The scent of his husband’s skin was complex; it brought comfort and relief and lust and a welling up of gratitude. He clutched him and Christopher protested that he was asleep but it was no serious protest and he turned toward the mayor.

  Later the mayor fetched the letter and Christopher read it in bed next to him in British-accented falsetto and the mayor laughed with happy relief and pretended she was someone else’s adversary.

  “But Bran, you have to go on tonight,” Christopher said, all at once serious.

  “Must I?” The mayor groaned, though he’d known it to be so.

  “Of course. Let’s get this done.” Christopher fetched a pencil and a pad of paper and brought it back to the bed, and together, in the leavened moments of afterglow they composed a rebuttal: half rant, half reason. A plea to the thinking citizen. The mayor needed everyone to know he was serious about city changes. They would quickly dilute Maid Marian’s message with progressive action of their own. He’d bring in new advisors, announce some new proposals, give everyone an extra bonus water day from city reserves.

  “Do we have that? Can we do that without it going through council?” Christopher said.

  “Fuck the council. Get Jenny on the radio and ask her to round up any serious activists from the Southeast neighborhoods. We’ll—I don’t know, tell them we’ll have a town hall once a week or something. Let everyone know their voice is heard. It’ll scare the hell out of them, and then we’ll surprise them with our outreach.”

  A moment later Christopher came back to bed and told him that Jenny had defected to Sherwood.

  The mayor leapt out of bed and ran to the sliding glass door in the living room and flung it open. “Fuck you!” he bellowed toward the Northeast, and then he leaned on the balcony and held his head in his hands until he became aware he was standing naked in plain view of passers-by below.

  “Who do we have left there we like?” the mayor said from the bedroom door.

  Christopher shrugged and tapped the notepad with the pencil. “Let’s get in touch with the news. You need to be seen. You need to talk directly to the other neighborhoods. OK?”

  “Would you call them? I—”

  “Sure, love,” Christopher touched the mayor’s face briefly as he passed out of the room. “Hold it together, will you?” he said over his shoulder. “Now more than ever.”

  Smack in the middle of it the mayor lost track of his place. The teleprompter continued to stream words he should have been saying out loud. From the sidelines someone waved at him frantically. Noticing he’d stopped, the teleprompter controller slowed it down, and then reversed the speech to where he’d left off, mid-sentence, something about solidarity blah blah, stronger as one.

  She wanted their faith, he thought. He wanted faith too. Wasn’t he their elected leader? As if she were some omniscient who would make everything all right if they only lived their lives justly. He was fucking up the newscast, he was going to blurt something out. The rebellious egg in his mind, that patch of renegade brain cells responsible for non-sequiturs bristled and bustled, waiting to be heard, raising an anxious class-clown hand.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw his newsroom handler signaling him frantically.

  His lips parted and he held his mouth open as he tried to make out the next sentence on the teleprompter, the words garbling in his sight like some Arabic mash. Then he could hold it back no longer: “I want you to like me!” The voice that emitted from him repulsive, elementary-school indignant. “I’m honest too. She’s no Robin Hood!” The mayor wiped his brow where a drop of sweat stung the corner of his eye. “Chris!” he yelled.

  The television went fuzzy dark for twenty-two seconds, as if someone had slipped a sheet of black construction paper over the front of the camera lens, and then the mayor appeared again. He smiled hugely, with a touch of mania, made a joke about channeling the leaders of nearby nations, and continued his speech from where he left off.

  The first couple days had gone awkwardly. Talk about fires, she thought, and the putting out of, but need everyone be a match? And reporters had been everywhere recording all of it. She’d granted three interviews already. Borders were still being sealed off, Rangers didn’t yet have a feel for their attitude, and a handful of angry citizens gathered around HQ with their Sherwood letters in hand, wanting an explanation about what this nonsense was all about despite holding the explanation right there in their hands. Throughout the territory there were a dozen or so scuffles and a few fights, and at least one death that she knew of. The fights had been over the pettiest little shit—one Ranger had thought he could leverage his new position to get his old girlfriend back. There were a spate of robberies, in two of the cases her Green Rangers had actually apprehended the thieves. Finally, one gentleman in his thirties was killed. There was a head wound involved, but no one came forward to confess what happened and no family materialized to claim him.

  She had no time for meting out punishments commensurate with the crime. When Rangers, to her surprise, started holding people prisoner at HQ, she realized she needed to set down some laws and consequences. After much deliberation with Gregor, they decided the penalty would be swift, merciless, uniform, and irrevocable: major crime offenders would get drop-kicked to the other side of the border and a wave goodbye. A special four-person escort service was formed to do the drop-kicking, and the “prisoner’s room” at HQ was quickly taken over by Volunteer Coordination. Minor crimes—neighbor disputes, fighting, theft other than water theft—would receive double volunteer shifts, with no pay.

  After a few lucky days of news coverage, the immigration office had begun to simply add potential new citizens to a long waiting list. The territory was growing at a rate that would soon be unsustainable. Out with the bad, in with the good. She’d mention the penalties in the next day’s Sherwood letter, along with the good stuff that happened—as soon as the good stuff happened.

  There were bits of respite, successes. Some days earlier she’d met with Commander Aachen of the National Guard, in the same park she’d later met the mayor. He’d sent a prompt reply to her written inquiry.

  She had practiced her case before she’d met with him, citing passages of the Portland Water Act and the US Humanitarian Aid Act. She would appeal to his honor as a soldier. She felt certain of the rightness of her case.

  He listened to her impassioned spiel in the darkness of the park, where they both stood away from the danger of trees. The moonlight etched deep shadows over his eyes. Far at the edges she saw the machinery that had delivered him.

  “Hm,” he said when she’d finished. The pitched tone of his voice was like that of a mother with a rolling pin in hand, at ready to use as a tool of punishment, as her boy explained how the window broke. He was not a large man, barely taller than herself. His white hair shone ghost-like under the moon as he stood still.

>   He did not ask any questions. As she awaited his answer, she sweated. It was not so hot, but her body overheated. Sweat leaked from her scalp and dripped its way down her nose, along her temples. She fanned her shirt to cool her armpits. She began to speak again but he held his hand up severely, and she stopped.

  “I’m thinking,” he said, a voice more like a train whistle than a man’s.

  The moonlight painted an ice sculpture of the commander, white and frozen stone-still. And as if on cue, her body temperature altered again. A breeze shifted quietly through the park and her brow felt a chill with the wetness there. She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. This is one way to wield power, she thought, to make me wait interminably.

  He clasped his hands behind his back and for minutes they did nothing. She felt the slow gears of his mind calculating. She gripped her fist and swore to herself that she’d get what she came for. He was just a man with toys, with soldiers to order around, and she would back him down. She prepared to speak again, but then he smiled pleasantly.

  “Of course, our job is to execute the distribution of rations,” he said and his smile stayed long on his face as she waited for what came next. “If you want to subcontract that job and take our payload, I am willing to trial the arrangement for a period of time. If you can do a better job than we can, and we expend fewer resources, what objection could I possibly have?”