Sherwood Nation (22 page)

He wondered if his father had ever experienced this. Perhaps this is what caused him to go to war in the first place. The simple ownership of soldiers necessitating their violent use.

In the mornings, he stood in front of them in the back field, training. They were always training, he thought, and it was his doing, his to control. He worried they would not be ready.

He was comfortable in front of them—he’d led the small gang of his father’s in King neighborhood. In the Going Street Brigade there were twenty-eight men and twelve women, and nearly every one had more combat experience than he had. They’d fought in wars or had martial arts training or boxing or had been in a gang. One of the women had been a city cop, and it had been a difficult decision to bring her on. She lived nearby and the allure of Maid Marian and disgust with the city had pulled her from the force.

The newly formed Going Street Brigade ranged in age from twenty-four to sixty. The sixty-year-old, a man named Hugh, was slower and out of shape, and Jamal worked at him, curious to figure out what he was capable of.

“He’s not an old man, Jamal,” his father said. “I’m sixty four.”

“Well,” Jamal said and shrugged. “Join the elite force then.”

“No,” Gregor scoffed, “I hear it’s run by some kid.”

“A kid wonder.”

“Mm. Kid blunder maybe.”

“Yeah. Thanks, Pop. We’ll be out here at six a.m., you old shit, if you can handle it.”

“I could handle it.”

“Yeah?” Jamal raised an eyebrow in challenge.

Gregor dropped the bundle of papers he held with a slap on his desk. “I’ve got real work to do here, son. Why don’t you go play with your pals.”

“Will do,” Jamal said, and backed from the room, his arms flapping like that of a chicken. “Bawk, bawk.”

Hugh, the sixty-year-old, had fought in two wars by the time he was twenty-six, both times against guerrilla forces in urban environments. Jamal prayed like hell they weren’t preparing them for a war, but the man knew what he was doing. He had skills they needed. After the wars, Hugh had spent thirty years as a high-school chemistry teacher.

“You sure you want to be in the combat unit?” Jamal asked him in private. “I don’t want to step on any toes, but we could definitely find you a different job.”

“Yes sir,” Hugh said. His face was hard and set but his eyes were complex, tree rings, Jamal thought, layers of previous wars and a new war. He was shorter, and his shoulders were big and hunched, his head sticking above like a turtle’s from its shell.

Jamal thought of how he must have disciplined his students with chemical equations and repressed a shudder.

Hugh saluted, the motion brisk and all elbow. His fingers a poised karate strike against his cheek.

Not being from a military background, it amused him to see how they each showed respect for their superiors from whatever experience they had. Many soldiers fell into the comfort of military protocol, but others—say Preston, a big kid with hair scissor-cut to the scalp and a ring of tattoos around his neck, a black belt in Aikido and a fondness for practical jokes, bowed comically to Jamal. In some cases, Jamal enforced a formality, in others he was lenient. When bowed to, he bowed back.

Ten years back, when he was eighteen, Jamal had gotten his first action in the war between drug houses. Another dealer had tried taking over the east side of Gregor’s territory and six of them had been sent to scare the other dealer off. Only Jamal and one other came back that day. They’d underestimated, and by the end of the month half of all of Gregor’s crew had been killed, including his older brother. The neighborhood shuttered themselves in and locked their doors and the police cruised the streets in their cars, too afraid to set foot on a blacktop painted with blood.

To Jamal’s surprise, Gregor showed up for six a.m. training wearing ugly teal sweat pants and a T-shirt, fitted tight over the Liberty Bell of his belly. Jamal could feel his troops tense. Those who had military training stood at attention, and the others followed. Here was their general, in his gaudy glory. Jamal wondered what his father was trying to get at.

“Sir,” Jamal said, “do you think we could talk in private for a moment?”

Gregor trotted toward the back of the lineup, “No, I do not.”

“But—”

“Proceed!” Gregor said over the heads of the Going Street Rangers. “Some asshole called me ‘old’ yesterday.” There was nervous laughter among the troops.

“Pop . . .”

When Gregor was properly in formation, he saluted and waited stoically.

“All right. All right, people. Let’s do this,” Jamal said.

The mayor was home, finally, from a day that would not end, a series of meetings strung together like purgatory popcorn necklaces. The day had given him headaches that piled on top of each other, stood on each other’s shoulders, achieving what before it no other headache had achieved. Mayor Brandon Bartlett limped to the sofa and slumpe
d into it and did not move.

“Hard day, love?”

“Nnh.”

“Sorry.”

The mayor heard Christopher’s progress about the room but could not be bothered to open his eyes, even as the footsteps approached.

“Fancy a diversion, then?”

The mayor opened one eye and observed Christopher’s hand holding a slim, hand-rolled cigarette. “Is that?”

Christopher bit his bottom lip and nodded yes, his eyebrows raised.

“Yes,” the mayor said. “Really?”

“Really.”

The mayor stood up and pumped one elbow behind him. “Oh my god, yes. How in the hell?”

“He has his ways.” Christopher shrugged. “He can get, when he wants.”

“He is a savior is what.”

“To the balcony, monsieur?”

“After you, my friend.”

Like two high-schoolers, the mayor thought, with their hands cupped over the flame, a dusty wind scraping into the fourth-floor balcony. With the first inhale he had a coughing fit and could not stop, but it was a gleeful, barking cough, his lungs burning and the taste in his mouth pleasant. With his nose he chased the wispy trail of secondhand smoke, vacuuming it up, which made Christopher laugh.

When it was finished they watched a deep red lava-bubble where the sun descended from the sky. The mayor leaned into the concrete edge of the balcony and watched, looking over his city as its gray haze transformed first into a dusty golden cityscape, and then an umber quilt. He still loved it, right? The place he governed, and the job itself?

Pretty much, he thought.
Yeah
.

“There’s this woman—” the mayor said and stopped. He could picture her face as if it were there in front of him. He closed his eyes and saw her, dressed inevitably in head-to-toe blue, blue blouse and blue jeans, or a long blue jeans dress, with eyebrows as if made of cat fur, long curly brown hair, a shade of lipstick that never seemed right—too brown or too pale. She and her husband manifested everywhere he went now. He, the husband, gray-haired and short, covered himself almost entirely in political bumper stickers and the mayor wondered at the mechanics of that. His whole body a collage of protest snippets. Was it the same outfit, or did the man have an unlimited supply? They were his heckling regulars, the oddball standouts in every crowd of impassioned protestors. The husband always the first to lead a cheer of
Heartless Bartlett
, or to call out in opposition to any bland thing he might take a stance on. But her: She never said anything. She simply watched him, and when he met her eyes, she smiled. Weirdly, he’d come to think of her as who he most wanted to please. The protester’s wife, less shrill and more dedicated, dressed in blue; expectant. Waiting for him to do right. Perhaps she was his biggest fan, and her husband his most fervent detractor, the mayoral office the dividing battle line they’d chosen in their marriage. He wondered about sending an emissary right now out into the city to find her and bring her here. It would be nice for them to sit across the table from each other and she could smile at him, with her small mouth and big cat eyebrows.
Constituent
, he could say,
Leader
, she would reply. They would shake hands. On a piece of paper he would draw up all of his plans for her, they’d sprawl across it like mathematical equations that she would find brilliant. He would make changes for her, listen to her reasoned advice. Then . . .

Oh I am so stoned,
he realized suddenly. He looked into the distance and smiled. For a moment, looking out over the darkening city he felt like embracing it, a man lonely on a platform, ready to hug the thing he stewarded. For that was what he was: janitor, nursemaid, protective father. It seemed entirely unfair that he was of mortal stature. He should be a hundred feet high, with a skyscraper-sized broom for housekeeping duties. He would walk the streets with great footfalls,
bom bom bom
, sweeping it free of drought detritus, sweep right into the Northeast where he could feel them plotting against him. Big dust blooms blowing out in front of his broom.

“You OK there?” Christopher said.

“Me? Hey, yes,” the mayor said. He reached out and grabbed Christopher’s hand and smiled. “Hell yes.”

Somewhat later they went to bed and had sex and then in the dim moonlight lay on their backs, their eyes wide open, staring upward. After a long period of post-coital contentment and silence, they had one more conversation that went something like:

Mayor: Mmbop.

Christopher: Beep beep.

Mayor: Mmbop.

(long silence)

Mayor: Please sir, may I go to sleep now?

Christopher: Are you talking to me?

Mayor: (Laughing.)

Mayor: I think I was talking to my brain.

Christopher: (laughing)

Mayor: Unless you’re the one making it so noisy in my head I can’t go to sleep.

Christopher: Me? (gasps, laughter relapse)

Christopher (finally): No, I’m looking at the walrus. It won’t let me go to sleep either.

Mayor: Walrus?

Christopher: In the paint up there? I thought you knew about the walrus.

Mayor: Oh my god. Oh my god.

Christopher: Right?

Mayor: There’s totally a walrus there.

Christopher: Every night, it watches us.

Mayor: Creepy.

(silence)

Mayor: Should I do something? About it?

Christopher: (chuckling, turning sideways into the mayor) No, he’s OK. He watches over us.

Mayor: Could cover it up? Tape something?

Christopher: Mmm, no.

Rumor spread that water rations would be cut in half, and the rumor was
posed as a question on the news. As dusk neared and the power went out, neighbors reeled from their houses, disoriented with outrage and thirst. They banded into menacing groups, full of rage and looking for something to blame. They were quick to argue and fight, bloodying themselves, and Gregor knew they would destroy each other for lack of a proper target. The only means they had, he thought as he watched the infectious violence roil down his street, was to destroy what was theirs. He checked his pistol again and spat out into the dust in his yard.

No riot would come to his porch. He would stay there to make sure of that. But he had a different task for Jamal. He put his hand on the head of his first born and mouthed quietly the closest thing to a prayer he could bring himself to say, and then pushed him toward the stairs to do his work.

Jamal grabbed his bicycle from the porch and carried it down to the street. He checked his watch. There were others, and they had to be in synch. Then he rode into the waning light. “Maid Marian is in jail!” he yelled out, his voice a hoarse wail that rattled into other people’s houses. “They got Maid Marian at Killingsworth station!”

The Killingsworth station was the last, closest bastion of city forces. A small police station that mostly drove their cars toward the wealthier neighborhoods west of Martin Luther King Blvd.

The effect was immediate. He watched people sway as if from a blow, and then spring back, changed by the news. Rioters spilled from their own neighborhoods toward the Killingsworth station, the rage making the target only a general aim as the wave of them burned cars and ransacked houses en route.

A single squad car was swept up into the action. A cameraman intrepidly tagged along and filmed. The following morning on the news, after a severe warning about the nature of the content, the film was played in its entirety:

A policeman exits his car and strides into the rioters with a pistol in each hand. On his face there’s a grim look, but pleasure perhaps, the sense that this is the moment he’s been waiting for. He places his feet wide apart like a gunslinger. Around him is a scene of complete chaos—hundreds of people, a mixture of all races, but mostly black or Hispanic, breaking the windows of cars, exiting houses with whatever can be carried—water, food, TVs, stereos, furniture.

On the porch of one house a man is in a wrestling death-grip with another who appears to be stealing his unit gallon. The policeman nears the porch, puts his arm through the railing and shoots. The owner falls, the back of his head suddenly difficult to distinguish. There’s an audible “Jesus Christ!” from the cameraman and the camera temporarily loses focus and control and during this moment there’s a second bang of a gun. When the camera stabilizes, both men lie dead on the porch, the unit gallon resting between them.

The camera follows the policeman for a few beats more, wielding both pistols, shooting—sometimes at point-blank range. At one point the policeman turns back to look into the lens of the camera and smiles, much as the baker smiles as he watches his customers take the first bite of his best bread, as if to say, are you getting how good this is? Do you not see the rightness of what I’m doing? He kills a few more before a mob storms over the top of him. The camera angle jumps around, its angle upside down, the scene in rapid retreat as the cameraman flees for his life.

Police fanned across the city to quell the violence. Sixteen officers came to the defense of the Peninsula neighborhood, the upscale neighborhood across Martin Luther King Boulevard from the riot—they stationed themselves four to a squad car at strategic locations, hoping to contain what they could not stop and ready to flee. The National Guard did not show up, and this absence remained an unanswered question posed on the news. The police shot the occasional canister of tear gas into densely packed areas or to seal off a route. Until the riot simply burned itself out. No one came to the defense of the poorer neighboring King and Vernon neighborhoods; they were left for dead.

When the video of the lone policeman made it to the news and was played repeatedly in a hypnotic loop, the city turned upside down. The policeman was not found, presumed dead. That there was no longer anyone on whom to take revenge for such heinous brutality only fueled more destruction.