Sherwood Nation

by Parzybok, Benjamin;

  “It’s time to decide,” Jamal said.

  “No, not yet.”

  “Shit or get off the pot.”

  “There’s time still.”

  Jamal finished his tea and leaned his head back against the house. “No,” he said firmly. “There’s no more time.”

  Renee sat on the floor of her room with Bea across from her. They’d found a cribbage board and cards and had been dealing games since. It felt good to have the distraction, and they played in a giddy, amped manner, calling out their wins and smack-talking each other.

  Bea looked good to her, sitting cross-legged with a fan of cards on her knee. She was backlit and her hair shown a golden-red on her head, the freckles across her face like a paint-spraying of summer.

  In here, they were safe, and the world she’d spun into motion moved outside the door without her.

  “Fifteen for two, fifteen for six, and a pair makes eight, sucker,” Bea said.

  Renee dealt out the cards and thought about going to the tower to talk to Zach. She needed someone with whom she could strategize. There were those who trusted what you did, and those who followed blindly, and those who made suggestions, but with Josh gone she didn’t feel like she had anyone scheming on the same level, arguing and contradicting her. Could Gregor? she wondered. She had made a fool of herself in front of him, she thought, she had over-extended and squandered the opportunity for a genuine ally. She reached into her pocket and fingered the green laser there.

  “You put down the crib?”

  “Sorry?” Renee said.

  “Dude.”

  There was a knock at the door and they stared at each other for a brief moment before Renee yelled come in. It was Jamal. Renee invited him to come sit with them.

  “Cribbage,” he said.

  “You should take my spot,” Renee said.

  “She’s thinking about your dad,” Bea said.

  Jamal nodded. He opened and closed the palm that held his list of things-to-do, permanent-markered there in black. At the top was: Pop.

  “Chances?” Renee said.

  Jamal shrugged. “I worked on him, and . . . I’ll keep working on him.”

  “We don’t have much time,” Renee said and stared at her cards, confused as to where she’d left off with the game. “We’re getting noticed. We’ve got a tank of water burning holes in our backyard. I need to make a decision. If Gregor isn’t going to do it, it’s got to be someone else. Link, Martin, Salzar, Charles.” She shrugged. “I haven’t decided who’s next.” They were not, the rest of them, a basket of Easter eggs from which any choice might be pretty, more like deer droppings, or worse. She needed someone with a deep history here, a wisdom and influence. There was just the one that might work, and the rest she wasn’t sure she should bother with.

  Jamal nodded. Hearing those names brought a flush of heat to his face. If any of them did come in, there would be some talking to do. He wondered if he could fight against his own father. But he’d made his choice. You could not make an allegiance to a family-run drug trade. There was no idea there, there was nothing to swear to. He balled his fist, closing the to-do list from view. “How much time?”

  “Twenty-four hours,” Renee said.

  “Is anyone even playing?” Bea said.

  “I’ll play. I’ll totally play,” Jamal said.

  Renee handed him her cards. “I’m lost here, you take mine.”

  “I warn you, no one’s more lucky,” Jamal said.

  Renee swallowed hard at this as she made way for him. She had firsthand proof of Jamal’s luckiness.

  “And also, I cheat.” He shrugged as if that were just the way things were.

  Renee lay back on the cot and listened to the two play and decided to give herself two minutes there. After the recruitment of a strong arm, the number and scope of items that had to be done was dizzying. Lieutenants, she said to herself, the word arising up from some Napoleonic history lesson, conjuring up someone who might wear tassels on his suit coat and carry a saber and wear a handlebar mustache, which Bea would look nice with. She chuckled at the thought and could hear the two of them pause to look over at her. The smell of their unwashed bodies was rank in the room. Lieutenants playing cribbage. She loved them, and loved listening to their game banter, manifesting in counting and cursing at each other: fifteen two fifteen four a run for three makes seven. And the crib—fuck. really? fuck—that’s right, for fourteen. Lieutenants she had put in terrible danger and was on the verge of doing again, digging their hole deeper, and this sobered her so that her muscles locked in place, frozen, with her breath held. She was the one playing the game, the one pushing the all-in bet into the middle of the table, gambling them like chips.

  Gregor decided to go there himself. If you were going to do this sort of thing, you didn’t call her to you. He knew that. For the first time in a long time, the roles were reversed.

  He didn’t leave the house much anymore and felt odd preparing himself for the out-of-doors. He sent people scurrying about in front of him: prepare his bike, find his clothes, tell her he’s coming.

  When he was finally on his bike in the front yard he looked up at the neighboring houses, trying to remember which unfortunate interactions he’d had with each. Which were his allies, which not. He felt a sort of mortification. Like a man raised from his tomb into a different time, blinking into the sun. Gone soft and dead in the interminable years.

  He wore the eight men who accompanied him him like a suit of armor as he rode, a Roman phalanx of pedalers. He could have fired up the Cadillac, but it was so out of repair at this point, and carried so few. Nor did it seem appropriate for the task at hand, somehow.

  He was not an indecisive man, not by any stretch of the imagination, and so it was startling to have his mind offer up alternatives and second-opinions and double-thinks as he rode, nearly bringing him to the point of steering the whole damn column of them back home. But he persisted, as all men of firm opinions do, for even as his mind faltered, it bolstered itself too, fortified and re-fortified, shooting justifications like warning shots across the bow, so that he glared straight forward and pedaled without speaking, bent on their destination. He had not been under anyone else’s employ for some time. More than anything it took courage, he was coming to find.

  Jamal, who rode to his right, thought the woman was destined to do what she set out to do. And that was one quandary he’d swept around his mind. If she were to succeed, there would be a persuasion necessary for anyone—anyone with power—not affiliated. And he knew, he was now destined to be that persuader.

  People on the street knew him. They stopped what they were doing and stared with wide eyes as the entourage passed. Some feared him. Some knew him as the grandfatherly Pop who rolled in with charitable funds. It was possible that she already had someone. That they might already be heading into some sort of confrontation. But no, Jamal had assured him.

  As he pedaled he found his legs still had strength. Though on each upward pedal his knee bumped against his belly, his hands gripped the handlebars with, he imagined, his old bear’s strength, a power natural to him, that age could not drain away. Perhaps he was not so old as he thought. He began to set the pace and drove his entourage forward.

  The state of the streets saddened him, their previous vibrancy now thwarted and twisted by poverty, fire, and crime. What part had he had in this, he wondered. They passed a house that belonged to an old girlfriend of his, a tryst he’d had behind his wife’s back. She’d had the smoothest skin he’d ever known. The house was a small two-story built in the nineteen-teens. The porch leaned sadly, on the verge of collapse. All that was left of the windows were a few shards of glass. It was clear she did not live there anymore, that most likely she was dead, and this caused his chest to quake as he rode. Why had he not reached out? It wasn’t only the boy’s prodding. He was doing the right thing. He knew he was.

  They stopped at the end of the block, the headquarters just up the street. He cau
ght his breath and watched people come and go. Bicycles streamed from her HQ at regular intervals, and people walked with purpose to outbuildings and neighboring houses that her organization must have gobbled up like a hungry wolf.

  “Well,” he said.

  “Let’s go, Pop,” Jamal said. “I know where she’ll be.”

  “We’ll walk,” Gregor said and dismounted from his bike. He would have preferred to have done this over tea, at his house. For not the first time that week he considered his desire for predictable patterns and routine. He had not always been this way. It is age that has brought it on, he thought, and here I am beginning entirely anew, beating back these habits with new, radical risks. He cursed quietly and briefly fantasized about turning the whole ship of them around again. What a relief it would be to re-enter his house, sit in his chair, await the next visitor, to ignore whatever impending chaos may come. But within him, at the very bottom of him, buried by time and loss and cynicism, was the seed of something whose existence he scarcely admitted to himself. She might pull this off. What she wanted, what Jamal wanted, was what he wanted. To separate from the whole rotten mass of the country, to carve the one good bite out of the rotten apple, to be free of their flags and rocket ships, their posturing and ignorance. Fuck them all. They could do better. He waved a charge! signal to Jamal, and they followed him into the compound.

  Bea stood guard outside of Renee’s office for nearly six hours as Gregor and Renee hammered out their agreement inside. At times the volume rose to a shout, and she winced, desiring to go in and kick the old fart out. She stood at least four inches over him, and she thought she could take him. She would be the panther against his bear. Go for the eyes, she told herself, punch his neck. He would be slow, but could take a lot of damage.

  It was times like these when she fetched water. She held the glasses in her hand for a moment, facing the door, listening to the muted shouting from within. She knew why he had to join—they would be the mother and father of Sherwood, the good cop and bad cop, the leader and the enforcer. They would be parents to the hundreds that now worked for the organization. But Bea didn’t have to like it. She waited until the right cadence in the argument, a moment she could not help but interrupt, just as a child might try to dispel a squabble between her own mother and father. Then she bustled in, as innocently and yet as noisily as possible, setting the first glass down in front of Renee. It wasn’t until Bea had already turned away and was placing a glass down in front of Gregor’s spot that she realized Renee had winked at her, and this made Bea happy. She amused herself with the thought that mother must be winning this one.

  Gregor paced and Bea asked if they needed anything else. He looked tired to her, exhausted even, as he hobbled stiffly back and forth across the room. For a brief moment she felt sorry for him, remembering how aggravatingly stubborn and strong-willed Renee could be.

  Then she pictured his body as a crash-test dummy, and her karate chopping it, and felt better and left them to their work.

  As she stood guard, Jamal dropped by and listened at the door.

  “And?” he said. He rocked with agitation from foot to foot.

  Bea shrugged. “They’re yelling a lot.”

  “It’ll work,” he said. “If it doesn’t, I’m counting on you, babe. Put them in a half-nelson, whatever it takes. Right?”

  “I don’t know,” Bea said.

  “It’ll work,” he said. “He wants this, she needs him. It’ll work. But I can’t stay to find out, it’s fucking up my nerves.” Jamal tapped her shoulder twice with his fist and left.

  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 sh
e 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.