Sherwood Nation: a novel

by Benjamin Parzybok

  “Twenty minutes?”

  She swore. She hadn’t sent a single message, only laser-carved the tower with bland, distracted desire. She pocketed the laser and said she was going down there.

  “Renee,” Bea said.

  She was not making decisions for the territory, she was making them for herself. Perhaps they—she and her, her two selves—were falling apart, a schism growing. She didn’t care, she wanted to see him. She was fastened on the idea now and couldn’t let it go. It had to be done.

  “I’m going down there,” Renee said.

  Gregor’s Ranger looked back and forth between Bea and Renee. Renee said nothing to ease the woman’s mind.

  “That’s a really bad idea,” Bea said, “a really stupid one.” There was anger in her voice which Renee had not heard in a while, and she felt a twinge of aggressive excitement at hearing Bea rise against her.

  “You stay here, Bea. Help Gregor, tell him he’s in charge for the night.”

  “Bullshit,” Bea said.

  “Yes,” Renee said.

  “I’m coming the fuck with you,” Bea said and Gregor’s Ranger compulsively stepped back a pace.

  Renee looked out over the city and felt elated and relieved and wanted to hug her or punch her and she tried one more time, her voice notched into Maid Marian’s, the voice of one who commands an army. “You stay here. You have a job to do.”

  “No way. I’m coming with you, that’s work enough,” Bea said and mounted her bike and gripped her handlebars as if she expected Renee to jet off without her.

  Renee hid her smile and turned to the Ranger and instructed her to tell Gregor to take charge until they returned. “We’re going to get Zach. Keep him steady and focused if you can. Here, give me your water.” Renee reached for her canteen. “You got all that?”

  The girl nodded and stood there. Renee could see she was afraid to leave with the burden of such awful news and for a brief moment Renee felt like hitting her too, taking it out on this young innocent Ranger, such an easier mark than Bea, straddling her and beating it into her, for her slowness to obey, for her sullen terror. What was it she was becoming?

  “You say, ‘yes, sir,’ and then you ride,” Renee said, finding Maid Marian’s commanding condescension come to her and the girl snapped “yes, sir,” hopped on her bike and road toward headquarters.

  “Well,” Renee said. “What the fuck, right?”

  Bea laughed the tension off and told her she was an asshole and a dumbass and Renee agreed.

  They both knew the border section on the map well. There were border crossings and smuggler’s crossings, some she’d created, others she monitored. One she’d known about but never seen. They headed for this one. It was imperative no one see them, not her Rangers or the smugglers, not citizens of either side. The spirit of her country depended upon her, she knew. She was the air inside its balloon.

  Gregor’s Ranger rode two blocks in the dark, her heart racing for the news she had to bear. On 28th and Prescott, under the boughs of a barren oak tree, she barreled her bike headlong into a large man in the dark, his impact grunt a thing she heard but did not ponder, before she hit the ground herself.

  As the night went on Gregor’s pacing became more pronounced. He became violent with the notes, digging through them at a frantic pitch, handing out stacks carelessly to Leroy and the Rangers. They were sitting among thousands of notes now and he pulled notes archived in storage.

  One of his Rangers asked what they were looking for and he wasn’t sure. That was the problem. Any single statement could be a clue. Suddenly every note seemed turned against them, each one a carelessly veiled threat.

  “2216 Going St—wants a baseball bat. For baseball. Mentions it every time I come.”

  “4411 Ainsworth—fresh signs of many holes dug in the yard. When asked what they’re for, acts confused.”

  “6212 15th—burned her own house down on purpose, then moved next door to 6210. I’m not even sure what else to say about this.”

  What do these mean, he wondered. Were each of these a clue into nefarious activities or were they the idle motions of a citizenry going about their business? Did they all add up to a whole?

  “Please,” Leroy said. “Please put them back in the same order. These are all filed.” Leroy clutched his head as he watched the room he’d helped create erupt into chaos. He hovered over the top of Rangers reading through stacks with brutal carelessness and then discarding them, as if they’d memorized them and had no further need. He elbowed in and re-sorted, grumbling and shaking.

  Gregor wondered where Maid Marian was. He checked his watch—four hours to bike to a water tower and back? On the outside it might have been an hour-long task.

  “6747 8th St—thinks she saw Batman.”

  “6411 Grand Ave—many people coming and going from this house.”

  Gregor crumpled a handful of notes in his hands and stared out across the room, trying to make his eyes focus. There were ten Rangers in the map room now. Each sat on the floor, an archived box of notes cradled between their legs, which they dug into with Christmas fervor.

  He’d had enough. “Stop!” he barked. Everyone stood abruptly, the tone of his voice compelling them up. He signaled to two of his rangers. “I need the entire Going Street Brigade awake and in the yard and twice that many Rangers. Get them there and lined up in forty-five minutes, no matter what you have to do. These orders override everything else they may have going. Pull them off the street if you have to. Everyone else, out. Wait in the yard.”

  The Rangers quickly fled and he was left in the room with Leroy, who fluttered from box to box, trying to repair the damage done. Gregor tossed aside his crushed fistful of notes. He’d give Maid Marian one more hour.

  Gregor stood in front of his Rangers, a third of them armed Going Street Brigade troops, and rehearsed his orders in his mind before he spoke them.

  They stood, lined up as best as able, in the failing battery light of the backyard, looking bedraggled and off kilter, most pulled from their beds.

  “Take a minute to straighten yourselves,” Gregor said. He needed a moment before he introduced panic into the territory. He walked a rectangle around them, counting them again and doing his best to memorize the dimly lit faces of those he did not know by name.

  He returned to the front and cleared his throat. Jamal’s absence was conspicuous, he knew. This was his job. And they were all aware of the possibility of her presence there in the house, the bedroom where she slept; he could see their idle upward glances, and none would know yet that she was not there.

  “This morning,” Gregor said, “we are doing searches. You will be in groups of five. Two Going Street Brigade and three Green Rangers to a group. Eleven teams in all.”

  He selected a leader of each group and brought them into the map room—lit by candles and windup flashlights—for instructions. Leroy nodded, manically, Gregor thought, to the soldiers and moved stacks about as they came in, so as to keep them from trampling the piles on the floor.

  “That’s enough, Leroy,” Gregor said with irritation. “Leave it be for tonight.” He had no power over him, not really, but it didn’t mean he had to wade around some obscure filing system when they had an emergency.

  Leroy raised a long bony finger and pointed at him and said something unintelligible and Gregor wondered if he’d been scolded. He steered the Rangers over toward the Prescott Street map where the water tower was.

  “Maid Marian and two Rangers went missing between here and there.” He tapped the map. He’d said it now, and it could not be unsaid. There were gasps and questions, and he silenced them fiercely. “I want six teams here. Houses searched and questions asked of everyone along this line. Stay in view of each other at all times. Two Rangers and one Going Street Brigade enter a house, one man at the op
en door, and the last Ranger standing in the street with an LED. Two teams to a block. Work fast, be courteous but direct, ask questions. Search the entire house.” Gregor estimated they were roughly an hour before dawn. “Do not say who or what we are looking for. Do not tell your Rangers. Tell them you’re looking for a fugitive. Did everyone catch that,” he said, his voice lowering to a hostile grow. “Do not. Do not tell them what you’re looking for. Get going.”

  After they’d filed out the door he turned to the remaining four, who shuffled their feet nervously and wondered what was next.

  Gregor sighed and closed his eyes. He pressed his fingers into his eyebrows. Eyebrows that had suddenly followed the rest of his hair into grayness. Then he moved the remaining four Going Street Brigade to the Woodlawn map section of the room. One of the men he knew well. He’d served under him in the wars. The man studied him carefully now, and Gregor avoided his eyes.

  “Jamal is missing,” he said.

  “What’s going on, sir?”

  “Jamal is missing,” he said again, the voice hushing out of him with venom, and then he waved the question and response away. An epidemic of abductions seemed to be sweeping across the nation, and he feared for every Ranger he sent out. “We’ll take five teams here. Be careful.” He jabbed his finger into the map near Woodlawn Park and wished his finger could crush the whole lot of them, every last house in that neighborhood.

  As the bassoon-sound of Celestina’s prodigious snoring began to rattle the house, Martin tiptoed out of bed, put on his clothes, grabbed the Jesus bat and headed back onto the street for another inning against Sherwood Nation. Rangers generally kept to the middle of the intersections, so as much as possible he walked the back alleys or just along the porch line. With all of Sherwood in power outage, there was only the light of a three-quarter moon to be seen by, wispy cloud-haze slug-trailing across it now.

  At the mouth of an alley he heard the approach of bicycles along the street, and along with them Maid Marian’s voice in Doppler as she went past. His dead eye throbbed at the sound of her. Does she do that? he wondered, go on bike rides in the middle of the night? If he were in charge, he would do no such foolishness. Nevertheless, the night felt suddenly lucky. He was too slow to leap out and home-run one of them off their bikes, but he hobbled along in a hurry after them.

  After some blocks of this, the futility began to wear on him. He was slow. His feet were wedged into cheap, dead-man’s loafers, made more tight by blister swell. They were fast and long gone. He should have taken the bike he’d stolen. He trudged along with the bat on his shoulder, his limp exaggerated as he favored the bruised knee. Tiny pain grunts rose up out of him with each step, unh, unh, unh, so that he sounded like an ecstatic pig at the trough.

  At 24th and Prescott, walking down the middle of the street under the eerie skeletal night shadow of dead trees, a biker rounded a corner and aimed right for him. He could see a glint of its chrome in the moonlight, and he wondered if it bore Maid Marian. It was moving fast and he stepped to the right to avoid it but it swerved into him. He called out and shielded himself with the bat but it was too late. He heard only the crunch of their forms, wood bat and bicycle parts and his face colliding with the rider’s chest, the handlebars with his stomach. The breath was stolen from him and he was knocked flat. From the ground he gripped his gut and searched about for his weapon, sure that a second round was coming. She had attacked him, alone and single-mindedly.

  “Motherfu—horror of god, you crazy bitch,” he hissed when his breath came back. But under the tree shadow instead of the bat his fingers found the slick topography of a human face. He yelped and recoiled.

  He crawled on his hands and knees until he located the bat and then he stood over the form on the ground. “Get up,” he said. He prodded her with his foot. He swung the bat and it thudded with the form’s thigh and there was no stirring. If this was the end of her, what a sorry end it was.

  “This is for you, Fred,” he said into the dark, and it spooked him.

  He reached down and fumbled around until he found the front of the rider’s shirt. It was a woman, he ascertained, and it was not yet a corpse, if he read true the soft pulse at her neck. A moment of exultation passed through him. “Ha ha!” He lifted her shirtfront enough to raise her head off the ground and dragged her slowly across the street, out of the shadow and into the light of the moon.

  Only by the short length of the hair could he tell it was not Maid Marian. “Jesus Christ,” he said, feeling disgusted with himself. What the fuck was she doing riding in the dark? It was hard to gather much more without light. Her forehead was wet with blood where it had collided with the bat or him or the blacktop. There was gore on his fingers and his conscience nagged at him.

  Could he leave a woman to bleed to death in the street? He cursed his luck.

  He gripped her shirtfront again and dragged her laboriously back across the street and onto the front porch of the closest house. He beat on the door with his bat and then backed off the porch and hid in the dark. No one answered and he dug his fingernails into his palm.

  Finally, he returned to the porch and picked her up—she was not overly heavy—and slumped her over his shoulder. In the other hand he carried the bat. For a moment, before the knee pain of the grueling walk home set in, he felt like the manliest of cavemen, hunting for a wife in the night.

  At Celestina’s place he slumped her against the wall, under the painting of Jesus, and leaned the bat in the corner. He fumbled around with a candle there, cussing each faulty match-strike until one lit. She was a young black woman with her kinky hair scissor-chopped short and a head wound. She was muscular and her thinness gave her a youthful gangliness. He went to wake Celestina.

  “Accidente,” Martin said as he steered Celestina in to look, “por bicicleta.”

  “Ranger.” She pointed at the girl’s clothes.

  Martin jumped. How could he have not noticed?

  Celestina directed him to carry her to his bed in the spare bedroom. She began to care for the wound in a businesslike manner.

  Between the two of them, they stopped up the bleeding and got her situated, but she did not wake. His hand shook when he touched her skin, which was cool and marbly smooth to the touch. Celestina, too, impulsively reached out and touched the woman’s face. They acknowledged this with a look as they fussed over her. Celestina indicated she was going to undress her for bed, and so Martin retreated to the kitchen. When she was finished and covered, he retrieved his paltry possessions and moved to the couch in the living room.

  But he realized he wanted to see her one last time. Celestina was still there, hovering over her in the candlelight, though he couldn’t see what work she might be attending to.

  “Ranger,” she said again.

  He didn’t know what she meant by it. That they should turn her in, like some kind of lost-and-found Ranger doll? That she was not theirs to toy with? Or that perhaps they would come for her, a favorite possession gone missing. Strangely, the sight of her caused a zealous protectiveness to rise up in him. She had been fleeing in the night. He was responsible for her.

  Celestina put her hand on his shoulder. It was a surprise to him, and he stayed frozen where he was until she removed it, not wishing to interrupt whatever feelings she may be having. Until, he thought, he began to feel it too, something. Whatever it was, the three of them in the room.

  Renee and Bea rode block by block west along the territory, one block in from the border. At 26th they turned and walked slowly toward the guard station at Fremont. The street was quiet and lined by wide, spacious houses. The people here, at one time, had done well for themselves. Bare bones of giant trees, or the remaining stumps, were prevalent. Even now Renee couldn’t see a burned house on the block. She led them to a few houses from the border station and walked quietly up the driveway of an abandoned house with its windo
ws gone. Zach had told her of the tunnel’s existence ages ago. He’d tapped the map. “This guy,” he said, “just on the other side. I used to work with him.” His finger covered a house right on the border. “He says he’s digging a tunnel under his house.”

  “To where?” she’d asked.

  “I’m not sure he knows,” Zach answered. And so Renee had assigned Rangers to monitor the area. Recently a Ranger noted that the man had been spotted on both sides of the border and that he appeared after the border closed. Then a Ranger saw him manifest, his head rising from the ground like a prairie dog. At the back of a long-abandoned house there was a strange opening in the concrete driveway, covered with sticks and garbage. The tunneler, the Ranger reported, had wandered around for an hour without any purpose in particular that she could deduce, and then went back into his hole.

  “You’re fucking sure about this?” Bea whispered. It was the first she’d heard about it. They stood over the hole, a broken concrete opening into blackness. “You’re sure there’s no man living underground there?”

  “Yeah.” Renee smiled. “I’m sure. Don’t be a sissy. You got your gun, right? ” She relished the tease and chuckled. It was craziness to climb down into that dark shithole but nothing could stop her now. She shone her penlight down into the opening but it was weak and revealed only an amorphous gloom.

  She lifted her bicycle and tested the dimensions of the opening—it would fit going wheel first. She got onto her knees and put her head down into the mouth of it. There was an earthy smell and she caught something else she hadn’t smelled in a while—a wisp of dampness. The smell of dirt from deep in the ground, deeper than the graves at Rose City cemetery, deeper than the water tank holes.