Sherwood Nation

by Parzybok, Benjamin;

  “Carl, how much water you got?”

  “Just shy of a liter. Nut bar.”

  He and Rick had the same, minus one nut bar. He laid them out in an orderly fashion against the wall and tried not to think about them there.

  “Are we cool?” Carl said from the room over.

  “We’re cool,” Jamal said. He repositioned himself and stared back out the window and waited some more.

  He needed something to do with the time and so he emptied the contents of his pockets and backpack and arranged it on the floor in front of him.

  He had a clean handkerchief, three paper clips—likely the result of his trip to the map room—his pocket knife, his Sherwood ID, a hat, and paper.

  “What’s in its pocketses,” Rick hissed, watching him with half-lidded eyes.

  “Sadly, no magic rings or tasty fish for you.” There were keys to his bike lock, his home in King neighborhood, and a key to the stolen water truck he’d neglected to return. His phone indicated it was 2:47 p.m. He had the stack of neighborhood notes he’d stolen from the map room and a pen.

  “But if you feel like composing any poetry,” he said to Rick, “I’m all set up for you.”

  Rick didn’t say anything and Jamal watched him, wondering if the man had any chance at all. When Rick died he’d be in the room alone, and a terror gripped him.

  He scurried across the floor. Rick didn’t seem to be breathing and held stone-still. He shook his shoulder.

  “Yeah?” Rick opened one eye and blinked. “I was taking a quick nap, blood brother. I don’t feel very well.”

  “OK there, man,” Jamal said, “everything’s cool.”

  “Maybe I’m coming down with something,” Rick said and Jamal couldn’t tell if he was serious or delusional or joking.

  “Well, don’t die,” Jamal said; was that the best he could do? “Can I get anything for you?”

  “Hunky dory.”

  If the shots had been heard, he believed enough time had passed that a message would have made it to HQ and a response made. Jamal began to resign himself to the possibility that no response would come.

  “Carl?” he said. Carl had sequestered himself in the room on the other side of the entranceway, and he hadn’t heard anything from him for a while.

  Carl said something that ended in “gun” that Jamal couldn’t understand.

  “Think they aim to starve us out?” Jamal said.

  “Just one little shot,” Carl said. “I’ve been deducing which house to shoot at.”

  “Could last a couple days. They’ll know we’re missing before that, they’ll send people, right?”

  “Maybe the yellow house,” Carl said, “that’s the one I got a bad feeling about. Sending off some serious vibes.”

  “Yeah, hmm. They want some kind of war here, but who even is it.”

  “I bet they’ve been watching us this whole time,” Carl said.

  “Charles, I guess,” Jamal said.

  “They’re hoping we’ll bleed to death, but they didn’t even hit me. I’m not bleeding one bit.”

  “They hit Rick pretty good,” Jamal said.

  “I’m not going to bleed to death.”

  “Carl!” Jamal shouted, trying to get the man’s attention, realizing their conversations were only loosely connected.

  There was a long pause, and then Carl said, “Yeah?”

  “How’s it going, man?”

  “You already asked that.”

  “Think we should make a run for it? I am bored out of my mind.” He kicked at the edge of the wall with his non-wounded leg.

  There was a deep sigh and the sound of objects being moved around in the other room. “Nah,” Carl said. “That’d be crazy. They want us to bleed to death, but they didn’t even hit me.”

  It was glorious to be out on her bike going fast at night. She felt as though she’d left her new identity behind. Outside she was just Renee. Someone who’d once been a coffee barista, who had a boyfriend, who was a decent enough welder when called upon. Someone who, upon getting high, inevitably spent ten solid minutes laughing uncontrollably.

  They tore down Prescott and she realized the last time she’d biked in the dark was their first night in the territory. There were no cyclone fences sectioning off blocks now, and she took relish in listening to the peaceful hum of the neighborhoods.

  Power was out and people sat on their porches in the dark and talked. She wondered how many times they uttered her name just now in all of Sherwood. She repressed the thought. That was Maid Marian, and she was Renee. They shared a body, but she wanted to be only Renee tonight.

  At the tower Renee looked up at the underbelly and then south toward Zach’s house and had misgivings about the whole thing. There were only three possible outcomes here. 1) He wouldn’t answer, 2) he’d say no, 3) he’d say yes. Now that she was out and had shed a layer of Maid Marian, she felt anxiety that he might say yes and come back expecting it was she—Renee—who was asking him, when it was the territory who needed him now. She wasn’t sure where she stood in the matter.

  “Let’s go,” Bea said, impatient. She stood lookout and waited for Renee to begin.

  Renee pointed the laser pointer and toggled the green dot back and forth there on the underbelly of the empty tower. She waited for his reciprocal dot. She liked the idea of filling the tower with water again—a sign of ultimate power—though it’d be a brazen display of wealth and a security pain.

  For fun she traced the shape of a heart with the pointer and then quickly changed its shape when she came to her senses. It was a lonely dot there, a sole green point of light in a blanket of blackness. She stared down the hillside across all the somber houses into city territory. There were stars out above the city like a shining phosphorescent sea.

  Her arm began to get tired and she broadened the arc of her pointer, making sweeps along the tower, wondering if he was there watching but refusing to answer. Come on, she said. She turned and pointed it toward his house, out there somewhere, wishing for some kind of brute force communication, a trumpet blast, a rifle shot, rather than the passive communication she played at.

  She sunk to her haunches. He wasn’t going to answer, she realized, whether he’d seen it or not. It was for the best, his only reasonable course. Leave her behind, move on, start something new.

  “How long have we been here, Bea?”

  “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 open 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.