Sherwood Nation (59 page)

His leg ached with a nauseating pain. There seemed a certain rightfulness to his driving away with the mayor’s car. He patted the steering wheel thoughtfully and tried to decipher what might happen were the mayor to live or die. The National Guard saw the opportunity and took it.

He was tired. He turned off of Martin Luther King Boulevard and headed east toward the cemetery. He would bury the dead. They were his to care for. He knew the Sherwood gravediggers and along the way he would find them, if they were still alive. Then he’d drive to Maureen’s to help her put out catchment for the rain, if there was rain to catch, and then he would put his leg up and rest and wait for what was to come.

Zach tried to get through to her but it was like talking to the living dead. Not even a blink of registration. He would go wi
th her, then. The fear of the impending moment rang in him, a bees’ nest as he walked behind her, watching for her body to jerk with the blow of shrapnel, launched from the next National Guard jeep that might happen along.

After a while he realized he wasn’t alone. Behind him Nevel held his daughter Luisa and Cora and Jason walked hand in hand. Zach turned and tried to shoo them. “Go home,” he whispered urgently, “what are you doing?”

“We’re coming with her,” Cora said.

He told them she would be shot. They could all be shot.

“She came for us,” Cora said. Cora leaned down and spoke to the boy’s ear and then he took off running ahead. Zach watched him run up porches and pound on doors and then run to the next house. People came out and watched Renee walk in the middle of the street. She made her way down Fremont, her face hard and impassive, like the bow of a ship in the ocean.

Many left their porches at the sight. Behind them, the smoke from Sherwood HQ rose like a beacon. Many had believed her dead. They fell into place around and behind them, leaving Maid Marian at the front.

As they walked the crowd grew. Jason came back to them after a few blocks, panting and ecstatic, and other kids took up his job.

By the time they reached Martin Luther King Boulevard they were nearly a hundred strong. Maid Marian continued to burn in front of them, and they were the tail of her comet. Overhead the clouds were thick and tumultuous, a churning blackness in them. On the ground the dust was still and the streets were quiet. They said nothing as they walked. The only sound was that of hundreds of footsteps.

Zach watched the back of Renee’s head and knew she could not be talked to or persuaded. He checked the streets left and right for Guard jeeps or city vehicles as he marched. Beside him Nevel and Cora and Jason and Luisa walked holding hands, Luisa quick-stepping to keep up, even her chirp quieted by the moment. What were they marching for, Zach wondered, but he felt it too. This was their ship. Without it they were sunk.

By the time they reached Broadway, bicyclists and skateboarders had joined, and many more marchers, so that they were a swarm, flying straight to the center. They numbered into the many hundreds, perhaps thousands.

Maid Marian turned west to cross the bridge, which would lead them through Chinatown to the center of the city.

The National Guard had constructed an impromptu blockade in the middle of the bridge, having by now been forewarned.

The crowd followed Maid Marian to the edge of the bridge, and she kept walking. A string of the crowd, an arm of it, reached out with her, followed her onto the bridge toward the blockade. Tear gas canisters were launched, and Maid Marian walked in smoke.

At the front of the Guard, directly in line with the trajectory of Maid Marian’s path, was a young soldier named Daniel Curant. He was twenty-one years old and had joined the National Guard because he wanted to be noble and good.

He loved Maid Marian.

All night he thought of her as he lay on the top bunk in the barracks, wishing now he could work for her as a Green Ranger. In his mind the Rangers had risen in his esteem idealistically, so that it surpassed, even, the calling of the Guard. He kept a newspaper picture of her tucked into his pillowcase. He knew his chances, but even still he couldn’t help but imagine them together, with a little farmhouse perhaps, like the one his grandparents had had on Sauvie Island. Dogs would run and play at the river’s edge while they walked through the fields, and there would be a glow about her. And as she walked, he would observe that her feet scarcely touched the ground.

She seemed to be walking straight for him now through a mist of tear gas and he was having trouble concentrating on much else but the hypnotizing appearance of her glory. She shone, her black hair like a blaze around her, her figure pronounced against the dark dust storm coming in behind her. He could not yet see but clearly imagined the freckles across the bridge of her nose that he’d studied as if he were trying to decipher a foreign language. A message written just for him.

He watched the sway of her hips as she approached, unsettled by seeing in the flesh one with whom he’d shared such imagined intimacy, as if at any moment she might recognize him from his own fantasies or, terrifyingly, know what experiences he’d played out for them in his mind. Her face was stony and grim and it made him anxious.

The Guards around him shuffled nervously. She came closer, unflinching in her stride, focused straight ahead, on him, it seemed. She was going to walk into his embrace.

The man to his right, PFC Connor, said something about how when that bitch is finally gone their jobs would be a lot easier, and with alarm Daniel realized she was going to die. That unless she stopped and turned back some asshole was going to shoot her. His skin went haywire, sweat glistened across him as he panicked. He glanced up and down the line and with all his being he knew he must save her. Could he stop them? Take one out before they shot? His face tightened into a grimace of fear as he looked out at her over his shield. It came to him what he must do. He drew his own gun and pulled it up. He’d always been a little to the left. He aimed for her shoulder and tried to account for his deficiencies. If he could just wing her, clip her like a bird, stop her trajectory. Maybe he could save her. He would save her and he’d tell her that and she would smile and thank him.
She
would understand.

He was jostled—several Guards called out when his gun came up—but he knew it had to be him. He watched her as he pulled the trigger, sending with it a wish, everything in his mind emptied into that bullet, the dogs on the river and the farm and the taste of strawberries and lying under clean sheets and hope, so that it might envelope her, that it might be the bullet that saved her. She spun around, as if she were a dancer, performing for him on stage, and then she was on the ground. He hadn’t seen where he’d hit her.

There was a terrific cry from the crowd who waited at the edge of the bridge. As one they rushed forward. Chaos broke loose among the Guards and someone knocked him from behind and he fell and someone else was on top of him, holding him down.

He could see her for a moment through the legs of others. He’d aimed for her left shoulder. They could fix a shoulder.

It felt like a string connected them. Lying on the ground, from the crown of one head to the crown of the other. A rumbling blast cascaded through the air and he smelled tear gas. Perhaps this is it, he thought, they were passing on, one shot, the other trampled in riot, connected by their fragile mortality. Joy sprang into him then; they were to be wedded by their synchronous passing. The chaos swayed over him and then back, like lying in ocean surf. Then his view of her was blocked by fields of boots.

The crowd rushed the soldiers and more tear gas was fired and guns were pulled. Another ear-splitting boom sounded, like God’s own angry voice, rattling the bridge. Daniel felt the bridge shake down to its very foundation. A drop of water moistened his cheek.

After. After the clash and the blood trickled in the gutters of the bridge, and what little rain drizzled it wetly from there onto the banks of the dry rive
r, after he, Zach, had struggled to reach her, and after he’d been beaten down and tread upon, a kick to his back that sprawled him out on the ground, after the people were arrested or dissipated or too injured to walk away, and after her body was removed, limp—he’d seen only an instant’s image of an arm swinging lifeless over the side of an ambulance’s stretcher—Zach walked up Broadway.

He had not been arrested. Weirdly ignored as he walked away from the chaotic scene, in slow pursuit of the ambulance, his mind focused only on her.

At the hospital he was told she had died. When the ambulance pulled in, she was already gone. A constant inflow of patients arrived and the nurse was at first kind and then increasingly short with him.

Outside, standing a few paces from the hospital entrance, he felt insubstantial, as if his body were made of layers of old burlap. He stood there and swayed as people rushed around him, and then he continued toward home.

He walked in the middle of the street. By now the freak rain had darkened it, the big drops falling sparsely. He turned at 20th and walked the bridge that spanned the freeway and watched I-84 below as the thoroughfare bore the military vehicles returning to base. His skin was numb, though the rain kept working at him, each one a surprise, chipping away the exoskeletons he’d piled on top, fashioned of fear and longing and necessity. His mind was numb too, a robotic insistency propelling him homeward.

At 21st and Flanders he stood transfixed as a large family scattered every dish they owned in the yard to catch the rain. They had flower vases, teacups, overturned drums, buckets, frying pans, sheets of plastic laid across cardboard boxes, and as the six of them streamed to and from the house, each time with some new vessel, they laughed and shouted at each other with glee. In the pans were mere drops. They would not net but a few cups, but he stood transfixed by their joy all the same.

The air was fresh and electric.

As he walked blindly toward his building, his shoes slapped into a tiny dirty puddle that had formed. It was a tactile sensation that bore repetition, and for a moment, upon first being cognizant of it, he stood where he was and tapped the same foot in and out of the puddle. Each time was a small pleasure.

At home, he paced his building. It became his new occupation, and he practiced it for days. Tamping down each floorboard with his footsteps like a blacksmith works a sword. Tempering them in his search to rest his mind. The news talked about Maid Marian’s death endlessly, and this required an infinite amount of pacing, of climbing the building’s stairs, of looping around his roof, leaving only for rations when need became dire.

In this way, for some time, his building became an island. Walked persistently by the castaway for no other reason than the act of standing still invited pain. A week passed, or perhaps two, lost in the meanderings of his building.

In this failing city run now by a semi-hostile National Guard, the future yawned uninviting and endless in front of him, and so he thought of it little. He only walked.

He watched as much news as he could manage each night, sharp slivers of it entering him before he was compelled to turn it off. With the mayor hospitalized, Commander Aachen appeared regularly in his stead to read in monotone, devoid of any of Mayor Bartlett’s charm, joyless in his delivery, until it was clear, but never stated, the mayor would not be coming back.

Zach studied the face of the older man as it filled the frame of his television set, his blond hair like bits of old hay. He was a dull reader. He seemed to believe that the intricate order he set up post–city council was somehow a bootcamp for the city that would quell its desires and set it straight. He wanted it, Zach saw, being on the television and in charge. He was not their accidental guardian. The newscasters appeared lifeless, changed since the city had changed, and he suspected they were under censor. They had heard little to no news from the outside world. The city slept on in a post–Maid Marian coma. Guard jeeps coursed up and down its veins, redirecting and taming and quashing.

Zach slept twelve and fourteen hours at a stretch, going to sleep at sundown and waking midday the next. It was a sickness, he told himself, that he was trying to sleep out. Many times he pondered infinite sleep as a cure to what ailed him, and he considered the various ways to obtain it. When he awoke there was little he could think to do but begin pacing again.

After some weeks, in a vacant stride through his office, he passed his desk. Upon it there was a clean, white sheet of paper and a pencil, untouched for some time. He continued circling around the building, and each time he landed back at the desk, with the blank paper there and its implied question, the paper a window to climb through. Outside a large, National Guard truck rumbled past and stirred up a cloud of dust.

Dear Sherwood Nation,
he wrote.

Zach tried to think of a way to pivot off the first line. He felt like he owed everyone a last word to hang on, or an apology, the guilt of his silence weighing on him. But there was so much to say and he could think of no way to say it.
Long time no see.
How’s your family? Do you miss Maid Marian? Do you ever think about . . .
He stood from the desk and for two more days he paced, avoiding the blank page.

No, he realized, there was nothing to say.

Instead, he would go there. He would go talk to them. He would find the others, the water carriers and the volunteer leaders and the Rangers, he would find everyone who remained.