Sherwood Nation

by Parzybok, Benjamin;

  “You work for the city,” the other, a heavy-set, blond-haired woman said. Her hands bore word-tattoos—Fire on the left, Ice on the right. The two women shared a striking resemblance and Zach spooked at the thought of the law being enforced by a great army of tattooed twins. He realized he was answering too slowly.

  “Spy,” one said and the other nodded. “OK, you’re coming with us. Come on, back on the bike.”

  Zach biked toward the Cully neighborhood escorted by his twin enforcers, relieved that they didn’t simply toss him back over the border but alarmed at being deemed a spy.

  They took Zach to a house he remembered, a behemoth of a craftsman, as if it were built for a race of people of greater height and girth, and he saw how it had morphed into fulfilling the needs of a government building. In a backyard the size of a small schoolyard field there were construction projects on one end and troops—the fabled Green Rangers, he assumed—being run through drills on the other. They stepped into the house and into a waiting area, walled off from the rest of the house with seats containing several anxious looking individuals. Perhaps they were waiting for her audience, he thought, or job interviews, or criminals awaiting punishment.

  One of the women steered him in, her hand firm on his shoulder. They went into a back room where an older black woman with a tall maroon hat was seated behind a desk.

  “What’s your business in Sherwood?” the woman said without looking up.

  “This one snuck in.” The girl had his shoulder like a dog bite. “He’s a spy.”

  “Mm.”

  Zach told them he was here to see Maid Marian, and that she was expecting him.

  The woman with the maroon hat squinched up her eyes at him. “I’ve heard that one today already.”

  “He works for the city,” the biker with fire tattooed on her hand said.

  Zach told her Maid Marian’s real name, and said she would know him.

  An older black man dressed in a black sweater and blue jeans appeared in a doorway at the back of the room that Zach hadn’t seen. In his right hand he wielded the bowl-end of a smoking pipe. He eyed Zach with cold authority.

  “I’ll take this one, bring him back.”

  They followed into the back room where the man seated himself behind a great desk. He wore a black baseball cap and the Maid Marian emblem was safety-pinned to the front. He was in his sixties, and from the moment Zach entered the room until he was seated in front of him, the man locked eyes with him. There was a professorial air about him and, from the way the escorting Ranger treated him, Zach knew he was in front of someone important. He sat and waited for the man to talk but he said nothing for a few moments. Zach fidgeted.

  “You work for the city?” the man said.

  Zach felt flustered and his face reddened. “How do you all know that? I work—worked—for an ad agency—we did work for the city sometimes.”

  “You crossed the border without permission. What are you here to find out?” Zach didn’t know how to answer and so they said nothing. “We are specifically looking for someone to make an example of to send a message to the city. Are you that person?”

  “No, sir,” Zach said hopelessly, his mind gone startlingly blank.

  “This would be an appropriate time to explain why you’re here, then.”

  Zach glanced at his woman captor, hanging back to see what their captain would order them to do with their prisoner. “I’m in a relationship with Maid Marian,” he said, and after no one made a response he felt like he ought to clarify. “I’m Maid Marian’s boyfriend,” he said, and it came out meek and uncertain. He wasn’t sure he knew this woman who had closed off the borders and flooded the streets with a green army. Any longer, “boyfriend” seemed such a small, pedestrian word. Unfit for a warlord. A warlord had a wife, or wives. He glanced again at his captors, who were at full attention now, surprised at this new, dubious news. Or perhaps she’s not here at all, he thought, this is just some great coverup, and it’s this man who’s in charge.

  “Maid Marian?” the man said, one eyebrow raised and ready to crush the absurdity of the claim. He tapped the desktop with his pipe.

  “I mean Renee,” Zach said.

  The gentleman pointed his pipe at him like a pistol. “Prove it,” he said, and then turned to his Rangers and made a gesture. The two soldiers left and before Zach had formulated a proper reply they returned with a small wooden table and two chairs. Then a teapot and two cups were brought. The older man rose from his desk and sat with him.

  Tea was poured and Zach felt disoriented, but grateful to be momentarily relieved of the glare of the man’s eyes. He fought the impulse to grab the tiny cup and down it in one gulp, a desire to quench the thirst that disabled all mannerly sipping. He sampled the tea and found it some kind of green. That was fitting, he thought, the tea, the uniform. Diuretics were heavily discouraged by the city and common sense—the man seemed to be indicating to him he was above these concerns.

  “I don’t know how to prove it,” he said. “She worked at a cafe close to my house in the Southeast. I went every day for many months.” He gulped another swallow of tea. “I’m not particularly forward.”

  He saw the man pull his chair close in, lean in so that he could speak in a quiet voice, the skepticism turning suddenly to curiosity and—perhaps—disappointment. So this is her boyfriend after all, Zach imagined him thinking, no great warrior but a bespectacled, uncertain fellow, with a slight stoop, shaved head, and arms that seemed extra long.

  “After a while I asked her out and—and, and she laughed.” The amazonian warriors who’d brought him in chuckled appreciatively at this, and he noticed that they had leaned in to listen too. “One night I was in the cafe at closing. She locked the door while I was still in there. I was the only person in there. She pulled a bottle of wine from behind the counter and she took pulls from it. She sat down at my table.” Zach couldn’t help but smile at the memory, feeling proud and lucky and singled out. “She slugged me on the shoulder and said, ‘where are we going, old man?’” Zach remembered how he’d treasured that phrase, how it had made it into their lexicon, the intimacy of “old man,” as if they’d been married for years.

  His interrogator nodded and looked up at each of the Rangers in the room with him for confirmation. “Sounds like her.” He held his hand out and they shook. “I’m Gregor, formerly of the Woodlawn neighborhood, and general of the Green Rangers.”

  “OK, nice to meet you,” Zach said and took the man’s hand, the adrenalin still a skin-prickling fear in him.

  “You suppose Maid Marian will still think you’re her boyfriend? Or is this stalking?”

  “Well, I think she thinks I am,” Zach said and looked at each of them helplessly. So much had changed in so short of a time. “She told me she had a job for me.”

  Gregor nodded at one of his soldiers and she left.

  Zach finished off his tea and stared at the tabletop. He’d like to ask him about the Green Rangers and riots and governing and water distribution, but after you have just narrated in some detail your inadequate courtship skills and as you wait for your prospective girlfriend to show up and claim—or not claim—you like a soiled scarf from the lost and found—well. Zach felt it a bit of a challenge formulating a question that wouldn’t bubble out like some anxious gas and float in the air between them.

  “It’s going well,” Gregor said, answering Zach’s unasked question. “Touch and go, I suppose. We’re calling this Faith Week. We’re working on borrowed confidence from the citizens.” Gregor put a weight of seriousness behind each word, so that one felt comforted by the inherent veracity of what he was saying. “What are your skills, Zach?”

  Zach looked Gregor in the eyes and realized the implication. Any boyfriend of Maid Marian was a public figure, or else ought to stay in the shadows.

  “I’m not sure,” Zach said.

  “He’s my strategist.”

  Zach and Gregor looked up to see Renee in the doorway. Zach
stood. She was dressed in green too, and the emblem of Sherwood was embroidered over her heart. They must have a team of full-time embroiderers and uniform-makers, he thought. Her braids flowed out from under a boxy baseball cap that said “Magnetic.”

  “Tea time with Gregor, eh? We drink a lot of fucking tea around here.”

  “Says he knows you,” Gregor said.

  “Yeah,” Renee said. “Come on, Zach. I want to show you the map room.”

  Gregor offered his hand to Zach again. “That’s a lot of clearance, boyfriend.” There was a warmness, and a warning, in the phrase.

  Zach turned to follow Renee.

  “If you want to put on a uniform—” Gregor said.

  Renee shook her head. “No, he doesn’t. Come on, Zach.”

  Halfway up the second flight of stairs Renee turned and embraced him. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “We’re barely keeping it together. People are dead.”

  “I’m sorry,” Zach said, not knowing what else to say and feeling the joiner’s angst well up in him. Every cause he could ever remember being a part of had failed. He returned the hug until she released him.

  Everything changed for Zach when he came into the map room. In the center of the room was a large round table with hundreds of scrawled notes. There were crumpled scraps of paper on the floor and a truly huge and impressive hand-drawn map that split the territory and its borders into several sectors laid across the wall and overlapping onto the ceiling and the floor.

  “Hey, Zach, you made it.” Bea stood at the table inspecting a pile of notes. She waved noncommittally and went back to her work.

  Zach traced his finger along the wall. Each house in the entire country was drawn out as a tiny square on the map. Inside the houses there were tiny scrawled messages, or just ID numbers. Along the streets, routes for water trucks and trash trucks were traced. There were dotted lines for bicycle delivery routes and little sentry box symbols for border guards.

  “I want you to meet Leroy,” Renee said and steered him to the far side of the room, her hand on his lower back guiding him.

  A wiry black man turned around from what he was working on. He had a fistful of white paper in one hand and a Sharpie in the other. Zach held out a hand to shake.

  Leroy looked down at his two occupied hands, then back at Zach, and nodded, and then Leroy started from Zach’s feet and scanned him up. It was a naked feeling, as if his whole body lay atop a photocopier glass. When Leroy looked him in the eyes again, he could see at work on his face a sincere struggle to fabricate some idle talk or perform some other leavening social convention. “The weather . . .” Leroy said and then held up the hand that bore the sharpie, waved it dismissively in the air as if to scratch out his comment. He turned and went back to his work.

  “He’s busy,” Renee said. “This is his map.”

  Zach spent the next while going through the pieces of the system. He learned how the notes arrived, how directives were given, how things were balanced and issues dealt with. He watched Bea and Leroy argue over whether an outpost ought to be written as permanent or temporary and he drank in the room; the immense amount of information induced vertigo. He was euphoric.

  Renee sat down in a big leather chair in middle of the room and pulled out a bottle of some kind of hand-labeled alcohol from a hidden drawer in the side of the chair. “The perks of being in charge.” She poured them each a glass several times larger than Zach felt comfortable with. “One of the very few. We’re starting up a distillery. This?” She swept her hand toward the room. “This is not my specialty.” She patted his hip. “I was hoping you—well. Take a look around, sweet thing.” She took a deep swallow, grimaced, closed her eyes, and leaned her head back. “See what you think. And then later, maybe you’d go on a date with me? I need a date. I’m glad you’re here, Zach.”

  While her eyes were closed he rested his hand on her forehead and studied her. There was something mortally tired about her. He supposed that transitioning from running a cafe to your own empire could do that to a person. He wished they were in a dark bedroom alone together. How many warlords went back to managing cafes? How many lived to a ripe age? He bent and kissed her lips and then inspected the room.

  Bea and Leroy squabbled about another section of the map. There was shuffling at the door and a man dressed in uniform stepped in and put a three-inch stack of notes in a basket there. Incoming data, Zach realized. He wondered if his own note, generated in his exchange with the border guard, lay in the bin and he went to inspect the incoming. There were notes for everything—the Rangers wrote down all interactions in Sherwood. “The swing set in Alberta park is broken.” “Mrs. Homes is too unsteady to carry her unit gallon from her front door to the kitchen counter.” “National Guard has two jeeps and six soldiers parked at MLK and Fremont—they’re setting up some kind of structure there.” “Jahrain suspects his neighbor of taking an extra ration for someone he claims lives there but doesn’t.” They collected everything. Zach looked up at the wall and at the carpet of discarded messages and the diagnosis came to him easily: information fatigue. The data crashed like a great wave into the room each day, inundating them. With no proper analysis of the data, no sense of trends, and no indicators, they would never understand the effect of their actions.

  After he’d read several dozen notes and made the rounds of the rooms, he realized he’d done this before. I’ve played this game, he thought. He had burned thousands of hours playing Command & Conquer, Age of Empires, Settlers, and other strategy games, and he’d done this for clients, too. Here was simply a massive real-life version. He found some scratch paper and began to sketch out plans for status meters. Indicators of the empire. Information was not power, it was the ability to synthesize data where the power lay, and he could give them that. He could give her that, he thought, and he hummed to himself with pleasure as he worked.

  He took all of the stacks out of the incoming basket and began to sort them across the floor.

  “Zach!” Bea said.

  “Don’t worry! I know what I’m doing!” he said.

  “Let him,” Renee slurred, her eyes still closed, “he’s a smartypants.”

  Martin came to splayed out in the wooden wheelbarrow-bike contraption in time to hear a shit-storm of swearing from the two dark forms digging a hole, his hole, in the dim moonlit graveyard. He couldn’t quite follow the gist of it, but one of the assholes had apparently hit the other with his shovel.

  He could feel death hover close. A rotund, corpulent, drought-fed reaper, scratching its ass and waiting for him to close his eyes that last time so that it could slaver away over his soul. His da’ would be there, wherever this reaper took him, and Martin regretted not for the first time how rusty he’d let his Russian get. Martin wriggled one arm free and tore a face-hole in the plastic bag they’d put him in. A cool wind blew grit into his eye socket. Martin sighed “fuck” in a long, despairing exhale, in pain and tired to be alive. He was going to have to do something about it now. In the chaos of the argument, he quietly tore open the rest of the plastic bag and then levered his naked, lumbering form over the edge of the contraption and rolled himself away into the night like a little burrito.

  When he was far enough away, he stood and walked toward the border on the far side of the cemetery. He’d be a real fucking horror for any accidental bystander, he was sure. He found a hole in the chain-link fence and squeezed himself through it, scoring his middle with scratches. Then he stood and held up his middle finger at the territory. Oh he would be back all right, he thought, answering the unasked question, motherfucking right he would.

  Zach scratched out a to-do list, remembering all the citywide campaigns they’d pitched to the mayor while working at Patel & Grummus. Inevitably there was something written on the back of the paper he used—this one had a fragment of what looked like someone’s insurance policy from a decade back. All the scratch paper in HQ had been acquired in a donation drive, much like everything else: printers, c
omputers, office supplies, paint, tools, lumber, odd items here and there. All Maid Marian had to do was put Needed for Sherwood on any outgoing correspondence and it poured in.

  On the list he put:

  Marketing objective: Instill sense of unique Sherwood culture

  by manufacturing cultural artifacts and pop-culture events

  Hire for internal marketing agency

  Refine logo (bow and quiver of water vials is functional, but has no personality—possible mascot wearing these?)

  Create first Sherwood holiday (Parade!)

  Water freedom day?

  Give something to your neighbor day?

  Show and tell-a-thon?

  Craft Sherwood slogan

  “Sherwood: Steal from the rich give to the poor”

  “Sherwood: FU PDX”

  “Sherwood: surrounded on all sides”

  “Sherwood: Forward!”

  “Sherwood: Vice Versa.”

  “Sherwood: Enjoyable Enclave”

  Brainstorm methods for helping rangers propagate culture

  Free concert and permanent concert venue—in which every band plays its rendition of the Sherwood anthem

  Create Sherwood fact sheet

  Zach leaned back into the couch in the middle of the map room and stared at the ceiling, wondering if one day other neighborhoods would be drawn there.

  “How we doing, Leroy?”

  “Mm,” Leroy said.