Sherwood Nation (34 page)

“All right, let’s get you another load.”

“Do other houses have tunnels, Dad?”

This was a startling question and Nevel froze for a moment, listening to the earth, wondering if just beyond any of the walls he worked on there were the ends of some other neighbor’s tunnel. Perhaps all men dug beneath their houses. Perhaps he was simply another victim of some mental illness epidemic brought on by the drought that turned fathers into moles. Perhaps the beautiful woman in 3416 was working on one and their two tunnels would meet. A tunnely tryst may await him already!

“Huh . . .” Nevel said, gripping the tunnel wall in a brief moment of vertigo. “I don’t know. We should ask your mom, wouldn’t she know?” After a moment he said, “No, let’s not ask her. I’m going to guess no, right?”

It would be a beautiful thing if it were so. He liked the idea of a secret shared closeness with his neighbors. Some mutual passion they could not speak of.

“What about your friends—do you know if any of them have tunnels?” Nevel asked. For not the first time he fretted about which other parents might know of his tunnel, none of whom he spoke with personally, but from whom he received news via the arcane facts gossip network of their children.

Jason shook his head and Nevel wasn’t sure if it was a “no” or “I don’t know.”

“Well, our tunnel is a secret, eh?”

Jason nodded automatically. He’d heard his father repeat this in one way or another often enough his lines were memorized. Still, he couldn’t resist asking of his father the question that evoked a different answer every time. “But why is it a secret?”

“Oh,” Nevel said and sat down in the dirt, coming closer to eye level with the boy. “We have a lot of reasons for our secret. Sometimes it’s nice to have a secret. It’s like buried treasure. You keep it inside your mind and know it’s something special that’s just yours, as long as you don’t speak of it.” Nevel worried his simile was going to work against him, for there
was
a pirate’s treasure in this tunnel, hundreds of bottles of water, squirreled away in an obscure side-hole. He didn’t want the boy down here digging by himself. “Also, the parents of your friends all think I’m a relatively sane person, right? Digging a tunnel under the house might be seen as somewhat
ha ha
.”

“Somewhat what?”

“Let’s say quirky.”

“Calden thinks you’re weird.”

“Yeah, well, Calden, right?” Nevel gave Jason an elbow nudge and Jason smiled.

“When will we be finished?”

“Digging the tunnel? December seventeenth, around four thirty in the afternoon, just in time for dinner.”

“Dad. Tell the truth.”

“Hell, I don’t know. Maybe when we discover what it’s really for or find something at the end of it or maybe when we get tired of it or reach some kind of digging satori, you know, like uh, higher consciousness, like a super power. Maybe we’ll build a giant robot over our house then. Maybe we’ll be done when we’ve taken it under the length of the city and we can stroll underground into the forest. That’d be nice, right? When do you think we’ll be done?”

“We could really build a giant robot?”

“Sure—but, you know,
after
the tunnel is done. All right! Back to work, soldier.” Nevel filled Jason’s buckets and handed them back. “Careful now.”

Jason gathered the buckets and set off back up the tunnel. Nevel watched him go, feeling honored that the boy would help him on the tunnel voluntarily and happy for the company—good father-son time, he told himself. And yet there was a guilt at sucking the boy into his mania, of making a five-year-old carry buckets of dirt out a tunnel.

He wished, for the boy’s sake, that a clear purpose as to what he was doing would reveal itself. Something the boy could learn from. Remember all that hard work, boy?
But look what we’ve built!
For now, and for him, the reward was in the process, to be doing something—anything—active with his hands, a forward momentum in a time when everything else remained mired in the doldrums.

There was a clattering and then a large crash from the front of the basement and Nevel jumped to his feet.

“Dad!” Jason yelled and there was a trapped scream in his voice.

Nevel sprinted the length of the tunnel and to the basement stairs. Jason was in a heap of dirt and buckets at the bottom of them, his left arm bent underneath.

“Oh, bud,” he said, failing to keep the anger out of his voice, the strange presympathetic emotion, for being clumsy; for the toil and derailment a child’s wound took. He picked the boy up and Jason’s mouth opened and no sound came and the boy’s arm swung loose and odd, like an appendage attached in afterthought. There was dirt in his teeth and hair, at the corners of his eyes and nose. Nevel rushed the boy upstairs, despising every molecule now of his own lazy, greedy self, that would load his son up with dirt for the basement stairs. He heard himself repeating “Oh no! Oh no! Oh no!” and realized with his parent’s third eye that that was particularly not what was required of him now. He took him to the car, which he thought might have a gallon or two of gas left, and laid the boy down in the backseat. Jason cried hysterically now. “It’s going to be OK,” Nevel said, “it’s going to be OK, we’re going to fix you up.” He stood and turned and let out a panicked bellow into the neighborhood. “Cora!”

He peeled out of the driveway, holding the horn down, looking for his wife, but she did not come out of whichever neighbor’s house she was in. He remembered his daughter sleeping in the upstairs of the house and cursed and honked again and then saw that everyone at the small border crossing was turned toward him. There had to be a closer clinic in Sherwood, he realized. He’d seen their new clinics on the news. He pulled forward into the intersection and a city officer came to his driver’s side window and a Green Ranger to the passenger side, each of them dutifully enacting their made up border-patrol duties, as if they were actors in some local drama. He rolled down the windows and they both looked at Jason, who continued to howl in the backseat.

“His arm is broken, let me through, for god’s sake.”

“You have a Sherwood permit?” the city policeman said.

“No!”

“City won’t let you enter without one. Or a Sherwood card? Do you have one of those?” said the Ranger from the opposite window.

“Fucking fuck the Sherwood card!” Nevel yelled. “Look!” He jabbed his thumb backwards at Jason. “I’m going to the clinic!”

“I’m very sorry, sir, the closest city hospital is on Williams,” the city policeman said.

Nevel revved the engine. “Come to your fucking senses,” he yelled.

The city policeman rested his hand on his rifle. “I cannot let you pass. The hospital is that way.”

Nevel eased up on the brake pedal and stared forward. His face was burning up and he was having trouble thinking about anything except ramming through the makeshift barrier. He thought he could race through it. He knew what awaited them at the city hospital. The crying stopped from the backseat. Jason was staring fixedly at the ceiling.

“Jason!” he yelled.

“It looks like shock, sir. Get him to the hospital. If it’s just an arm they can patch it up,” the Green Ranger said.

Nevel nodded at them, acquiescing, hating them both. He backed the car up. In his rear-view mirror he realized Cora was running toward him.

He yelled out the window, “Luisa is asleep, Jason broke his arm, these fuckers won’t let me through!” Then he put the car in first gear and tore off, leaving Cora standing in the street, and that was something else to hate himself for. The car dissatisfyingly gripped the pavement without fishtailing or leaving burning smoke in the air, as a father desperately trying to do the right thing might hope, leaving a show of super-heroic dramatics in his wake. He studied the right side of the street for an alley or intersection to veer off into, but each was blocked. Cyclone fencing covered half the entrances, Portland Police and Green Rangers like chess pawns from either side guarded the others. Which side doesn’t want you to come in, he wondered. At each crossing the car was slowed to a crawl as people milled about it, looking in, curious to see what an automobile was up to. They stared at Jason with vacant eyes. Nevel was in a full sweat now; his eyes stung as it dripped down his forehead. He beat on his steering wheel and honked his horn and felt like an orangutan among the walking dead and wished he had a gun to fire into the air to scare off these monkeys made slow and dull and bored by thirst.

He turned onto a city thoroughfare and raced toward the hospital. The wind kicked up a great whirling cloud of dust in front of them and before he had time to roll up the windows they were in it. He heard Jason cough from the back seat and croak out “Dad.”

“We’ll be there soon, bud, we’ll get you taken care of, you just close your eyes.”

Renee sat with her tea to meditate—meditation being a practice, she admitted, she found completely inane, the antithesis of action, just this side of comatose, but Zach had teased her about being all action xand no premeditation and with her new sense of obligation c
ame a nagging feeling of the necessity to be wise and to make non-impulsive decisions. Whether meditating helped with that, she had no idea—mostly she found her legs ached while some scrap of song echoed hollowly in her mind.

Afterwards—or rather, after she’d given up—she sat at her desk to go through the affairs in this, week four of year one in the country of Sherwood. She filtered through the mound of correspondence from all quarters: there were notices from the city and the daily press release, there were notices to write and notes distilled from the map room, there were inquiries from other impromptu organizations up and down the coast, some formalized but most asking for advice or writing in admiration or hoping for alliances or even stewardship. She did not want to grow, not yet anyway.

Their census had tallied 39,647 citizens in Sherwood territory, down from the last official census’s claim of 58,785. Some twenty thousand people had moved or died since the drought took hold.

The territory lines at the eastern reaches were in flux, and she was trying to put an end to that. She’d sent out teams to clearly demarcate the land with a six-foot-wide swath of mud-green paint, a mottled ugly color, the combined mixture of thousands of donated cans of paint from the territory. They painted it on with push brooms. If your house was in the territory, on this side of that snot-green stain in the road, you were in her protection; if you were outside of it, you were the city’s problem.

The territory was beginning to hum into its morning action. Outside her window down in the big grass field there was, in addition to the soldiers, a ration cooking class for all citizens over the age of fourteen, held daily for fifty people at a time. Next to it, the mandatory gardening class. All families were asked to keep a garden with low-water crops. Out front, she knew, volunteer forces gathered to work on various projects: trash services, community farms, school, and childcare. There were beautification projects, new classes to be given, and construction projects to complete. And at the center of it all: her. Queen of the year one.

Zach and Renee sat on the back porch in the dark and watched the Sherwood volunteers unwind after a day’s work. A great bonfire burned out in the open, under the stars. It’s strange, Renee idly thought, that the wood of empty houses and dead trees might bring such warmth as they tur
n to ash. That a dead thing might seem so alive. She shivered and scooted closer in to Zach. For a moment firelight reflected off his teeth as he smiled.

“Thanks,” she told him, and then wasn’t sure how to piece together the rest of the clauses that might attach to that. Thanks for coming up, thanks for your work, thanks for your ideas. She had told him she didn’t want to be seen together as a couple, so as to maintain the image of Maid Marian that the public knew. And because of this there was a bundle of guilt that propelled the thanks out of her. Thanks for sticking with me, even though I can be difficult. Even though I aim to keep you a secret, it is not because you’re not appreciated. She leaned her head against his shoulder.

He waited to see if she was going to say more and when she did not, he said sure.

A couple of Rangers passed out the door behind them, but this far from the ring of fire Zach and Renee were cloaked in darkness and were not seen.

As for Zach: just then, with the crackling of firelight beyond, and the sparks spiraling a wild dance toward the stars, so that as they rose one twinkling light was lost in the other, just then he thought he loved her. He held her hand and let her head rest on his shoulder and he was genuinely happy. For a moment he pondered this, but at a distance, worried that any study of his happiness might succumb to its analytical observation. But there it was, this happiness that arrived at last in a new trembling nation born from the worst of times.

He had spent some weeks there now, building the systems in the map room and enjoying these few quiet, secret moments. Hating her sometimes, too, yes. There were endless slippery facets to her. Despite his job as the director of information, he felt there was a subcurrent that he couldn’t quite grasp. It was the same with her personality. The longer he knew her, the less certain he felt of what he did know. If he could save this instant, freeze them both here staring toward the bonfire, a simple moment, he would.

“Chilly?” he said.

“A little.” She scooted into his embrace.

“What are you thinking about?”

She laughed. “Frogs.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

The image of his building across town came to him then, with its little projects and familiarity, with its promise of solitary pursuits, and like a little ping of sonar a tiny homesickness sounded in him. Here he slept behind the couch in the map room and lived among swarms of people, and shared his girlfriend with the world. He gripped her hand more tightly and she reciprocated. He didn’t want to think about this. It was as he’d feared, his happiness diminished with focus.

“They must have been the first to go.”

“Frogs? Were there even frogs here?” he asked.

“Well, everywhere, I mean.”

“Don’t think about that.”

“All right,” she said. And then after a while: “Are you doing all right?” She stroked his leg.

“Yeah. I’m good,” he said, but her query focused the lens further and he felt the sonar ping grow strong until it was a bugle-horn of sadness in him, like a hunter lost deep in the woods calling toward a distant home. He cleared his throat and palmed her knee. “Yes,” he said. “Frogs. They would have lasted a little while, right? Just moved in closer to their waning ponds? Rain-dependent plants were first, I bet. But they have seeds. The seeds could grow back.

“You don’t want to talk about it?”