Sherwood Nation

by Parzybok, Benjamin;

  “Ah ha,” Christopher said, “so you’re off. Come here a moment.”

  The mayor came around to the inside of the desk and sat on the edge. Behind Christopher hung a 1952 black and white aerial photo of the city, with its diminutive buildings and drab industriousness. Every time Mayor Bartlett stared at the photo he felt a sort of disappointment leak from it, for the future they clearly thought they had in front of them.

  “You’re going to do great,” Christopher said.

  “Yeah,” the mayor said, wanting suddenly more than anything a moment of Christopher’s pity, a comforting humf and back-pat.

  Christopher reached up his hands and took hold of either side of the mayor’s head and pulled him forward so their foreheads touched.

  He whispered: “You’ll give Councilwoman Sally one neat, ultimately meaningless concession. Councilman Edward will embrace it, but claim the ideas as his. Councilman Seth and Councilwoman Marybeth will rip it apart, but you’ve prepared for this. You’ll take the high road, right, love? Answer their questions directly and easily. You’ll smile and concede there are many other problems, but the city is tackling them one by one. You’re going to do great.”

  “Yeah,” the mayor said.

  “Go on, they’re waiting for you.” Christopher patted his shoulder.

  “Thanks, Chrissy.”

  The drive was short. They all piled into the car, and Mayor Bartlett wondered how he’d ended up in the middle, sandwiched hotly between his economics development guy, certainly no small man, and the communications director, who was fashioned entirely of hard right angles. She huffed again for reasons he was not entirely clear. He gripped the proposal to his chest and told himself: I am the people’s servant.

  Several blocks later, in front of citizens and other officials entering the building for the meeting, they spilled from the car like—the mayor tried to repress the thought of—a posse of clowns from a VW Bug. He smiled and shook hands while his team hovered close and his bodyguard loomed. The communications director huffed again, somewhere behind and to the left of him, her third huff, and this time it was clearly, he thought, directed at him.

  He turned and studied her. “Are you alright?” he said.

  “No, I’m not alright!”

  Mayor Bartlett leaned in close and smiled to someone over her shoulder. “Yes?”

  “I’ve tried to tell you half a dozen times,” she whispered feverishly, “Councilwoman Jacobsen has a competing plan.”

  “You have?” He could not remember a single thing she’d said in the last several hours and he wished immediately to interview his team in order to verify they’d heard her speak. “She does?” A shudder spasmodically pulsed down his spine, as if he were just finishing at the urinal. “And you have read the plan? Is it any good?”

  “No! It’s a disaster.”

  “For whom? I thought—”

  This was a moment which called for an executive decision. The wavering of his team, a sneak attack by an enemy at their flanks. Blindsided. Had the councilwoman already run to the press, touting her whatever?

  His executive assistant, whom he realized now had been steadily trying to steer him into the imminent meeting, now simply pulled him from the conversation, leaving his communications advisor trailing mid-sentence. He heard only: “Wastewater,” the word shouted as if it were the name of a pet ferret who had scurried into traffic.

  At the doorway, Councilwoman Marybeth Jacobsen herself was there to pump his arm.

  “Mayor Bartlett!” she said, and he immediately worried that in her sarcastic exuberance she was going to hug him or worse. Her smile slanted from her face in a vicious, made-up grin. A white T-shirt stretched tightly over her bust, emblazoned with the slogan Young and Hung.

  “What?” he gestured at her shirt, startled by the grotesqueness, feeling suddenly woozy and unwell.

  “I have a proposal!” she said, and signed off on her exclamation with a finger-jab to his solar plexus. “You’ll find out!” Then she turned and strode to her council member seat at the broad platform.

  “Marybeth,” he called after her. “Can you please send these to my office so we can read . . . before?” but the last words of his comment were lost. The council president was speaking over the loudspeakers.

  “. . . even if the mayor himself has not managed to make it to his assigned seat, the rest of you should, and if you’d be so kind, Mr. Mayor?”

  “Coming,” he said. He waded through the citizen audience and noticed it was sizable, two hundred or more perhaps, with his bodyguard close in tow. He could feel the baleful stares he received from them as he went. There was a time, he remembered, when he was loved. “Sorry.” He took his seat, “Yes yes, here now,” and was temporarily blinded by the camera lights. Every one of them in the audience had some hurtful snip he wanted to direct at him, given an opportunity. He thought he heard someone say Maid Marian, but could not grasp the rest of the comment that bracketed it. In his hands, the proposal had grown slippery with sweat along its plastic cover.

  “Thank you, Mr. Mayor,” Council President Seth Langstron said. “We do like to start on time.” The council president shuffled papers about in front of him and spent some time ordering them just so, into a few distinct stacks, as if each were a course—peas, ham, potatoes—he’d devour in time. When he finished he stroked at his thick beard and stared out into the room.

  “And so,” he said, “audience? There will be an opportunity to speak but you must wait for that opportunity if this meeting is to proceed within a human lifespan. Thank you.” He paused again until the only sounds were a stifled cough and the skirch of a moved chair. “First on order is not one, but two proposals that intend to provide a solution to youth unemployment, with the mayor at-bat first. Youth is defined as, Mayor Bartlett?”

  “To age twenty-five; we have ninety-three percent unemployment in our youth population between ages sixteen and twenty-five,” the mayor said.

  “That lucky seven percent,” the council president said.

  The mayor began his presentation, wetly pressing the remote control to turn the projector’s slides, showing slick charts and the research they’d done. Reading from the paper in his hand an occasional choice sentence. They’d given it their all. “We call this the Opportunity Pipeline,” he said, and smiled out into the audience’s glare. Fifteen thousand eighteen to twenty-five-year-olds would be employed by the city over the course of a year to dig a hundred-mile pipeline ditch between the city and their coastal desalinization plant. While the plant supplied only a tiny fraction of the city’s water, with time and budget it could supply much more. It was crazily ambitious, he knew, an idea for apocalyptic times, but exactly what his city needed. Putting youth to work meant fewer riots, less crime. And what would they be working on? Water issues. This was their Panama Canal, insurance against drought for the next hundred years. It was a perfect solution.

  When it came to discussing the costs, he mumbled his way through. The money could be found, but the question of money was always painful. Some money would have to be diverted. In a year’s time perhaps they could find funding to build a second desalinization plant. The existing plant distributed water to the city by diesel truck in tiny, expensive little increments. Opportunity Pipeline was long range thinking, he told them. “The idea is built upon the shoulders of grand successes, the Peace Corp and AmeriCorps, that have come before it. It gives an identity and provides meaning through useful works to the lives of our younger citizens. It is but the first of projects to come.”

  When he concluded a few people applauded and he grinned happily out into the audience but could not find the source. The mayor felt his heart beating in his throat and he put his hand there in case it visibly throbbed. To the side of the hall, his economics adviser raised his fist in the air.

  There was a moment of silence, and then from the back of the room came a wavering, indignant voice: “I have one question, Mayor Bartlett. Do you despise our children so much that
the only solution you can come up with is to exile them from the city?”

  The mayor smiled again, a bland smile meant to serve as placid acknowledgement of the question, the smile a dike against his rage that he would not let them breach. “I don’t see it as exile, but a chance to do something heroic for this city. Something epic,” he said, and immediately regretted the wording, which sounded like he intended to send them on some odyssey. “This plan addresses two of our most pressing issues simultaneously.” He wanted to use the term visionary, but fretted about how it might be attributed to him were it to come from his own mouth. “Imagine, if you will, how your own life might be transformed were you to spend a year or two on something this monumental, something that could help this many people.” He was speaking in platitudes and superlatives; he could feel them swell in his chest and he looked for a way to ratchet down. “This is not an exile, this is a mission! This is a purpose. It’s a chance to put faith in our youth, to charge them with a great task, to rally behind them. It’s giving them a chance to live up to and exceed our expectations.” He paused, partially for dramatic effect but also because he feared his voice would falter with emotion. “To create an artery that feeds the life to the city. Listen, there is no plan that is worthwhile that does not address our dwindling water supplies, am I right?”

  “Well.” Councilwoman Marybeth Jacobsen leaned deep into her microphone and breathed for a moment before speaking again. “We can debate the merits to such a plan after I present my own proposal. Council president, can I get a motion to present, since we have two proposals on the same issue, and then to discuss after?”

  “Granted,” the council president said.

  The councilwoman winked at the mayor. “I call my plan Young and Hung.”

  She pointed to her T-shirt, where the slogan was imprinted, and a number of the crowd laughed. The mayor scanned the audience to see if the laughers were simply her backers, or if the councilwoman was genuinely coming across as funny.

  “Let’s be honest with ourselves,” she continued. “We’re looking at employing mostly boys, are we not? To give a restless, and sometimes violent, part of the population something to do. I have four parts: jails, road repair, bridge maintenance, and wastewater treatment. Unlike the mayor’s plan, mine is cheap, employs more youth, and will actually engage them into useful activities.”

  He tried to search out the eyes of the other council members for the tiniest hint they might support his proposal but got no response. The mayor sank in his seat and only half-listened to the grating sound of Councilwoman Marybeth’s mic’d voice. He knew her plan, he could have drawn up her plan before she presented it, in his sleep, drunk or high he could have drawn up such a plan. It would have something for everyone, little crumbs for each citizen to devour so they could each claim, I got mine! No matter the useless pettiness of the component. In the oft-spoke words of the council president, it would “be something we can all get behind!” He could feel the work they’d done dying in his sweaty hands. He knew, politically-in-his-gut-knew, that the best thing he could do was to listen well and jump into her proposal with thoughtful changes, innovative ideas, that he should forsake the work they’d done in order to move any plan along. He could feel she’d already won. No matter that the work he held in his hand—and here he wiped its cover on his leg again—was the answer. He would stand when she finished and bear the torch of the great compromiser. Along the side of the chamber he could see his team deflating.

  Bullshit bullshit bullshit.

  His communication’s director waved at him and he realized he’d been mouthing bullshit into the mic. It had gotten Councilwoman Jacobsen’s attention but she continued heedless, bulldozer-like, her lipsticked mouth moving like a puppet’s maw. There was far more applause when Councilwoman Marybeth Jacobsen finished her shrill speech, that was clear. Was he simply unpopular? Did they really think her plan so much better? He felt, and then managed to overcome, the impulse to throw something, an impulse that, admittedly, he’d not had the wherewithal to overcome in previous, they-would-not-let-him-forget-about-it council meetings.

  He opened his plan again and read the summary to see how crazy it sounded. Opportunity Pipeline? It sounded insane.

  But then he realized the essential question. The revelation vaulted him right out of his seat. Keep cool, cowboy, keep cool. Since he was standing, he plucked the microphone out of its holder and thanked Councilwoman Marybeth Jacobsen for her balanced plan, his arm pointing out into the air like Elvis Presley.

  The council president was frozen, his mouth pressed to his microphone, on the verge of reprimand. “If you all will indulge me for one more moment,” the mayor said, “I have an addendum to make.” He tried to reel in his Elvis arm in a muted fashion, to keep his hips from shaking.

  His advisers all seemed to be standing on the tips of their toes, leaning forward at thirty-degree angles.

  “My friends, here is the essential question, the one each of us should be asking ourselves. Is this merely a long period of rotten weather. Or are we in a new era? Sure, your answer might pin you as an optimist or a pessimist. But it is vital that we ask this question of ourselves. It deeply informs the governing of this city, as well as our own lives. Do we make plans that make do, or do we stare hard into our future and create a city that thrives?

  “You might call me a pessimist, then, when it comes to the weather. How many years more will we stumble weakly along, hoping for our deliverance? The drought is here to stay, folks. I’m a pessimist on the weather, but I’m a huge optimist when it comes to our city. I want us to thrive again! Fellow council members, as you consider these two plans I want you to look into your own hearts for your ambitions for this city. Are you planning to pass time, or are you planning for the future?”

  If standing on the table now and Elvis-air-humping could in any small way add credibility to his speech, he would have done it in a heartbeat.

  “My team and I have taken a stance. These are hard times getting harder. Our plan is skating ahead of the puck—” He realized he’d just used a sports metaphor and felt a moment of self-disgust.

  “Thank you, Mr. Bartlett, Mayor,” Councilwoman Jacobsen said. Her mouth had gone strangely askew, gnawed on, one horrid red lip dry-stuck on a tooth, leaving a vampiric smear there. A few strands of her long brown hair were sweat-glued to her forehead. “I don’t think anyone here today is anything but hopeful and optimistic for our city. They’re all here, right? We’re all here putting in time to make the city better.”

  It did not feel natural to stand any longer, and so he sat. As he did so he saw at the back of the chamber, slouching deep into his chair, Commander Roger Aachen of the National Guard. Immediately he felt in trouble, chastised. The commander hovered over them all like some parent, the mayor thought, checking to see if the chore he’d tasked his children might need to be redone.

  A man of seventy or eighty came to the citizen mic and spent some time adjusting the belt of his tan slacks, after which he told the mayor what he thought of his plan: He loved it. He then proceeded to tell a well-when-I-was-a-kid, with the hard work and etc. The mayor imagined and immediately dismissed the idea of embracing the man, foreseeing the heart attack it might give the elder heterosexual.

  More citizens came to the mic and spoke, many he’d seen before, passionate activists who had caused him constant side-ache. His advisors had copies of his plans for anyone who wanted one. Questions were asked and answered. Councilwoman Marybeth Jacobsen droned on.

  A woman of about sixty, dressed in a patchwork skirt and a turquoise blouse, approached the microphone. “Mayor Bartlett? Many of us would like to know if you have caught Maid Marian.”

  “Yes?” the mayor’s voice came out gravely and he cleared his throat. He’d been slouching in his chair, only marginally paying attention, his body’s gravity heavier in assumed defeat. Paying attention and not paying attention, a useful skill for weathering the umpteen million city council meetings he would atte
nd in his lifetime. “I’m sorry, what?”

  “This meeting stays on topic,” the council president said. “We’re discussing youth employment, not criminal activity, so I ask—”

  “Have you caught Maid Marian?” she repeated.

  The mayor had fixed the National Guard commander with a sort of internal tracking device, constantly aware of his movements, and at the repeated question felt rather than saw him lean in to absorb the answer.

  “No,” the mayor said, “though I prefer not to call her by that name. The police chief and I are working hard on it. While we do not know the age of the suspect, these proposals”—here he gestured vaguely in the direction of the other council members—“will certainly go a long way to address issues such as”—he held his fingers in air quotes—“Maid Marian, meaning crime. I don’t think we’re entirely off-topic here,” he said, trying to win some small favor with the citizen at the mic.

  “What about the illegal water routes that came out of her political action?” she asked.

  “Ma’am?” the council president said.

  “I—action? We consider her actions a crime, robbing a truck is a crime,” the mayor said. “But of course the truck—we are looking into it, but having water itself is not a crime. There’s no evidence that—”

  “—If you do not stay on topic,” the council president droned on, “we’ll have to ask you to leave.”