Sherwood Nation (49 page)

“Renee’s at the back door.”

Nevel looked at him with exasperation. He put down the gun to scratch furiously at his scalp with both hands. “Am I supposed to know what that means?”

“Your back door? Maid Marian?” Zach shook his head with disgust. It’d been a long, unpleasant night of crossing the city at a snail’s pace, taking turns riding the bike that pulled his patient.

“Ah!” Nevel picked up the gun and they walked to the back of the house. “Just her or is that big girl with her too?”

“I heard that,” Bea said when Nevel got the door open.

Bea pushed past him and Nevel wondered aloud if anyone was going to ask if they could come in, and then he remembered Maid Marian out there in the dark.

“I’m sorry,” he said out the back door and into the dark. “Maid Marian?”

“I’m here,” she answered. “Zach, I need your help with your dude.”

Behind him Bea had opened the refrigerator and pulled out a pot of something. “I’m starving,” she said. “Hey, rice.”

Zach and Renee hoisted what appeared to be a hand cart up the three back steps and into the house. Tied to the hand cart was a snoring man.

“What’s going on here?” Nevel said. He gripped the front of his towel tightly.

“Maybe it was made a little too well,” Renee said.

Zach took the end of it and wheeled the man into the living room and then tipped the cart into the bed position.

“You guys—I? My kids are asleep upstairs—”

“Cute,” Bea said. “Can I see them?”

“Can you see? My kids sleeping?
No
,” Nevel said, “what? Why—”

“So you actually made the tunnel all the way through?” Zach asked. They stood around the island in his kitchen. Nevel clutched the towel at his waist, which was coming loose but which he could not retie for the gun in his other hand. Bea ate rice out of the pot with a spoon.

“It’s crazy,” Bea said. “It has decorations and everything. He’s crazy.”

“Can I see it?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know,” Nevel said, becoming increasingly alarmed by the slippage of his night from sleep into kitchen party, attended by people he barely knew, including a man tied to a hand cart.

“Sorry to wake you,” Renee said. “We need to use your tunnel for passage back.”

Nevel nodded and suggested they could use it right now.

“How are we going to get Zach’s guy through the tunnel?” Bea said. She held the pot out. “Anybody?”

“Is there another spoon?” Zach said.

“It’ll work,” Renee said. “We got him this far.”

“And that was awesome fun, a real hoot,” Bea said.

“It’s been kind of a long night,” Renee said to Nevel. “We don’t want to disturb you—maybe we ought to—we’ll replace that by the way.” She pointed at the pot. “They—” She pointed at the others and then shrugged. “We’re all sharing Zach’s one ration.”

“Sure, sure.” Nevel sighed and wished again that his tunnel were a secret. It felt to him a little like loaning out a favorite toy. “Cora will be sad she missed you.”

“Come on over then,” Renee said. “Join us for water ceremony at headquarters tomorrow. Bea, you get Zach’s bike,” Renee said.

“Aw!”

“You get what’s-his-name, Zach.”

Zach wheeled Nombre down step by step, handcart-style, pulling back against gravity to keep the man tumbling down all at once. Nevel stood at the top of the stairs behind him, struggling with a flashlight, gun, and the hastily retied knot of the towel around his waist. And so Zach descended mostly into darkness, with only the dim flickering of light behind him to pull out and tease the shadows in front of him, reminding him quite suddenly of how much he abhorred basements, dark places, and anything vaguely resembling a tunnel.

At the bottom of the stairs he wheeled slowly forward into the dark. “Anything in between me and the tunnel entrance?” Zach called up the stairs.

“Straight shot, straight ahead,” Nevel replied, lighting the way for Renee and her bike and then Bea and her two bikes.

Zach ran directly into some large solid object that clanged loudly. “Gah! There’s something here!” He tried to repress a panic that some foreign malicious object unbeknownst to Nevel was squared off in front of their escape.

“Maybe there’s a washing machine down there?”

“Maybe?” Zach said. Nombre continued to buzz along in sleep, and Zach decided the man was either seriously disturbed or on death’s door. He hoped he wasn’t doing permanent damage to him. He asked for the flashlight.

“Come on, Zach, we’re all backed up here behind you,” Renee said.

“Fuckety fuck fuck,” Zach said. He fiddled the dolly forward, touching the edge of the washer in small taps until there was no resistance. After a few more steps the stairway was unblocked and Nevel, towel, gun, and light came to lead them forward.

As Nevel passed, some pointed object caught his towel and instantly stripped him down to nothing, except his implement in each hand, a gun and flashlight.

The light was trained forward, and so they only saw a sort of shadow puppet show of him dancing about naked, the beam of light jagging about as he attempted to tie the towel on with gun and flashlight in either hand, and then the light went out and they were all left in complete darkness. “Just um. So that, just while I get adjusted, here,” Nevel said.

“I’ve just figured out what my own personal version of hell would be like,” Bea said. “If you shoot me while trying to put your towel on—I don’t know what I’ll do to you.”

“I for myself cannot think of a sin commensurate with the size of that penalty,” Zach said.

“Come on, guys, I won’t,” Nevel said, “OK?”

“I’m just saying my night couldn’t get any better,” Bea said.

“I guess I should have dressed,” Nevel said.

“You guess that, do you?”

“Wasn’t like I was exactly expecting visitors, right? You want me to lead you or what?”

“Not really, no,” Bea said. She hustled the bikes forward to get around him.

“What? No! It’s my tunnel. I’ll lead.” Nevel blocked off her route. He stepped into the tunnel and listened and Zach shuddered at the idea there might be anything inside there that one might listen for. He imagined a spice-worm rumbling along the passage, its spiked maw ready to devour them. Instead the faintest dankness seeped from it, which immediately eased the dry burning sensation on his eyes and his nasal passages.

“Water,” he said simply, and a great thirst overtook him. He touched the leather strap which held his canteen, long ago emptied.

“If you go deep enough, the earth is still damp. That’s why a few trees are still alive after all this time, the ones that can grow the deep roots,” Nevel said.

By the end of the tunnel Zach felt that he did not know his work colleague at all. He had seemed a lazy, boisterous, and somewhat annoying manager whom he tolerated for his appreciation of quality, because he often took Zach’s side in creative disputes. But he couldn’t understand a man who would make such a thing.

It was spooky and oppressive, this thing, and yet thousands of hours of work were apparent. A side, dead-ended tunnel became a shrine of some sort. All of the jewelry in the house had apparently been raided and hung artfully on the wall. At one juncture, there was a low table with a tablecloth and on top of that a bell.

Farther on they passed a communist design nostalgia section, Soviet era posters adorning the walls.

“What—?” Zach started and then wasn’t sure where to go with it.

“Right,” Nevel said, “right. I don’t know!” He flung his arms out and the light skittered about the tunnel. “It just, you know, happened.”

“I mean don’t get me wrong. I think it’s completely fantastic, some wild outgrowth of your mind, like a tumor, a second brain you’re growing in secret, a whole other side of you. I love it, really.” Zach could feel himself getting choked up suddenly and so he cut himself off. A meaningless pursuit of this magnitude was one of the noblest things he’d ever come across. “And you started it before Sherwood?” Zach said.

“Yes.”

“Where were you going?

“I don’t know.”

“Prescience,” Renee said.

Like the Earth’s intestine, Zach thought, and he wondered how everything changed when your meaningless project developed a use. Certainly if the tunnel had not been made, another connection to Sherwood would have been forged, but still, there was a divine madness here.

Back in Sherwood, Renee burst into the map room with her entourage.

“What the hell has been going on here?” she said.

Gregor and Leroy and Jamal and a few Rangers were standing at the Woodlawn section
of the map. “Ah, the white people are back,” Gregor said and smiled. Leroy strode across the room, an expression of relief on his face, and embraced Renee and gave Bea and Zach stout pats on the shoulder, as if to verify that they really existed, and Jamal queued up to do the same.

“I thought you were—” Jamal said.

“I saw you on TV.” Renee gave a low, approving whistle. “We should talk about that.” Renee went and stood next to Gregor. “Well. I saw the news. What the fuck?”

Gregor regarded her, the look on her face containing elements of anguish and disappointment, and a new coldness. “We had a crisis,” he said simply. “Where were you?”

Renee pointed at Zach. “You know where I was, solving the crisis.”

“No, I didn’t know where you were, except AWOL. You weren’t solving anything.” Gregor turned to the map. “Ten of ours have died. We found their bodies in empty houses in Woodlawn. Rangers and water carriers, snatched from the street and strangled or—” Gregor mimed a knife across the neck. “I’ve pulled everyone out of the neighborhood. We think Barstow’s people are here.” Gregor circled a Woodlawn block with his finger. “But I would recommend that we let Woodlawn go, at this point.”

Renee’s face burned with the implied accusations and she felt like slugging him. He had been taking over, she realized, he’d been planning to run Sherwood. She stared at the map, her eyes unfocused with anger.

She thought of the Rangers and water carriers who had died for her, her country, her charges. “Ten?” she said, wondering if she’d known them, the word coming out loud and ungainly and indignant.

Gregor nodded.

She jabbed a finger at him. “You lost Woodlawn in the twenty-four hours I was away.” She knew it was unfair—she had left him control, and that alone was her decision, and she had fled, but she felt like slinging shit back. The territory had been horribly mishandled, and he should suffer for it. She was aware of the room getting very quiet behind her.

“You were gone. Jamal was missing, Zach was gone. I squashed a city-funded rebellion. I executed four and took five prisoners. But they attacked via the media. Woodlawn is lost.”

“Executed?”

Gregor held her gaze, “Outside, in public.”

“Oh god,” Renee said.

“Would you have done the same?” Gregor asked.

Renee was startled by the question. She stammered and searched his face and then turned to look about her and saw that the room was tuned in to their conversation, openly eavesdropping, their stances as if preparing for some impact, gripping tables and floor and pencils so as to keep from falling from the ship. She looked at Gregor again and realized this was their showdown. He was waiting for her to openly challenge him, to relieve him of duty. In which case he would do what? she wondered. The man had executed four people. The word had to be dragged up through the outhouse floor from the past, a word covered in evil and shit, it damaged the whole meaning of Sherwood and she wondered how she could possibly let him stay. Who would take her side? The Rangers? But the city had killed ten of theirs, and in a moment’s rage she desired to pull another four off the city streets to even up the score. But:
executed
—it belonged to only the most horrific of times, not Sherwood. Gregor wore a gun and she saw him shift his hand away from it, as if they were each running along the same path of chess moves simultaneously and he wanted her to decide without its influence. The city was playing dirty and Gregor had executed four people.

“Who were they?” she asked.

“Three city police, one Woodlawner. All men. The Woodlawner was black. The officers were white.”

There was a subtle sarcasm to his voice now and she realized that she was evaluating the execution, weighing the need for such violence against the specific personalities and backgrounds, evaluating the act as the citizenry would. She regarded the man in front of her. How he’d built her an army and in so doing had brought security and peace to the nation. He had given them the water ceremony and was her friend besides. She had ridden her bike to the Southeast, while a secession was taking place, while Sherwood was in a crisis and Gregor had been in charge. They were Sherwood leadership; his actions were her actions and vice versa. She nodded to signal she understood. The city had knocked to find out what kind of game they were playing, and Gregor had told them.

“I would have the done the same thing,” Renee said, making sure her voice carried the length of the room now. Her throat hurt and she found it hard to swallow. She could feel Maid Marian coming back to her, the power and authority of her. Gregor straightened, his arms at his side, and she saw that she’d surprised him, that he’d been ready for fight or flight, or possibly to accept whatever fate she meted out, but least of all this. As the confusion dissipated, he saluted her and she saluted back. It felt awkward and odd and hugely relieving to lean on something like a salute to put a period on an argument that had run deep and unspoken.