Sherwood Nation (42 page)

She levered her body over the edge of the hole and dangled her feet. She hung there—there was nothing solid upon which to gain purchase and she panicked. Perhaps she was dangling her body over a hundred-foot well or some forgotten urban mine shaft. Perhaps Bea would hear nothing except the fleshy thud of her body as it collapsed into itself at the bottom. She held on there for a moment, grappling with the fear and her knowledge of the hole, which told her a man’s head had emerged from it, birthed from the earth.

Then she let go and immediately hit the top of a stool, which tipped. She crashed sideways into the bottom of the tunnel, the wind knocked out of her.

“Renee!” Bea whispered as loud as she dared.

Renee tapped on the side of the wall as she attempted to get her breathing back. “Oh,” she groaned. “I did it all wrong.”

The floor of the tunnel was hard-packed dirt and rock and she felt like lying there for a while and contemplating the opening above, with the silhouette of Bea’s head and stars beyond, a sort of moon in the black sky of the cave. She wondered if she’d cracked a rib. It had not been such a long time since her last injuries had healed. She stood and put her arms out to get a feel for the cave and found wood supports and clay-like earth. The floor of the tunnel sloped downward, as if the opening were the end of a teapot’s spout.

It was deeply quiet in the black openness that stretched before her in the tunnel.

“All right,” she whispered, “hand down the cycle, then I’ll set the stool up for you.”

“There’s a stool?”

“There’s a stool. It didn’t work out for me.”

“You’re OK?” Bea asked, but it didn’t really sound like a question, more like
you got what you deserved, hopping into a fucking hole
.

The tunnel moon eclipsed above her as the bike was lowered in. It was tight and she pushed it down the tunnel and rested it against the wall. Then Bea’s bike and then Bea.

Bea turned on her pen light and began to inspect where they were.

The tunnel was not simply a means of getting from A to B, Renee saw. It was cared for. There were pictures hung at intervals, the occasional rough relief carving in the wall. There were pockets and shelves cut into the dirt, and in some of these odd trinkets and other miscellany were stored. Someone had put in a good deal of effort here. They pushed slowly onward, speaking in hushed voices and following the tunnel floor down until it leveled out.

They passed under several narrow, four-inch shafts that went up to the surface through which fresh air trickled in. She guessed these were for breathing or perhaps tests to see where the tunnel was.

It was pleasant inside. Perhaps it was only that it felt good to be shedding her other self, to be on an adventure, but she felt anxiety melt away from her, even as Bea pulled her gun out and breathed raggedly with fear.

“You claustrophobic?” Renee asked, and in the dim pen light Bea gave her an irritated look.

The tunnel wended and they passed several branch starts, as if the digger had not known which way he was going and tried out other paths.

Deep in, far enough so they’d resigned themselves to the completion of the journey, the way back in the dark too far now to consider, they heard a man yell
stop
and they both jumped. Bea killed her light and they stood silently.

“Don’t come any closer, I’m armed and I’ll shoot.”

Bea reached out and grabbed Renee’s arm, but they said nothing. After a while, Renee said, “We like your tunnel.”

“I don’t have any water, and—” There was some shuffling about in the tunnel. “Go back to Sherwood. I’ve already killed lots of people down here. All of them are dead. It’s no problem for me to kill you two.”

They were talking to a citizen of Portland, Renee had to remind herself. She’d watched city news and reports and correspondence came in regularly from other neighborhoods. Water crimes were frequent.

Bea whispered, “I don’t believe him.”

“We’re passing through,” Renee said. “May we pass through? My name is Renee and I’m with Bea, who is also armed, but we’re not here for water, we’re just coming to the other side. You sound like a good person. We don’t believe you about the bodies.”

“Then go back and use the border,” the man said. “Believe whatever you want about the bodies! You’ll see if you come this way! They’re all stacked up here!”

“We can’t use the border. We do not wish to be seen.”

“Oh, for Christ sake!” the man said. “This is my tunnel.” There were a few moments where the man made shuffling sounds in the dark and sighed. “It’s not a freeway. How many people know?”

“Only us. We could put in a word with Maid Marian, give you Sherwood privileges.”

“You don’t even know her.”

“We work for her.”

“You’re Rangers?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

There was a long pause. Renee listened to the sound of Bea’s breathing and realized meeting a stranger in a dark, earthy tunnel was a sort of nightmare, and wondered why she felt so calm. “This and that,” she said, “administrative.”

“Will I get clinic access?”

“Are you sick?”

“What about school?”

“You have kids?” Renee didn’t know why she was so surprised, maybe building an elaborate tunnel under your house and having children seem antithetical, and then she remembered her own father and his time down in his wood shop, a two-liter bottle of wine always open on the table saw, tinkering at some project while he quietly sorted and railed against his various demons.

“How do I know you’re not bluffing?” he said.

“Goddamnit!” roared Bea. “We can’t hang out in the bottom of this fucking tunnel having an idle fucking conversation all night!”

“Bea,” Renee said.

They heard a woman’s voice faintly from somewhere deeper in.

“We have trespassers,” Nevel said. “Call Bill and Bob downstairs.”

“Who?” came the woman’s voice and then they heard whispering.

“Well?” Renee said to Bea. “What the fuck, right?” and then she walked out in front, slowly, toward the sound of the voices. Once she was a few strides beyond Bea’s pen light, if she closed her eyes it was no different than having them open. She wheeled her bicycle forward and stretched her other hand out to steady herself on the walls. “I’m walking forward,” she called.

She heard Bea cursing her in a whisper behind.

Renee walked another thirty paces around a curve in the tunnel, until she could sense the couple in front of her somewhere.

“Who are you?” the woman said.

“My name is Renee. My friend Bea and I need to come into the city for a little bit. It’s just us and our bikes. We need secrecy. In exchange, we can promise you clinic and school access in Sherwood.”

There was the light of a flashlight now and Renee followed that to the end of the tunnel. She let them shine it on her, lowering her eyes against the glare.

“How can you promise that?” the woman asked.

“You’ll have to take my word on that,” Renee said.

“I know who you are,” Cora said.

“You
know
this woman?” Nevel said.

“Yes,” Cora said quietly, “I do.” Cora put her hand to her mouth. “Are you in trouble? Can we help?”

“What?” Nevel shouted. “Who the hell is she?” Nevel squinted at them in the dim light but saw only two women covered in tunnel smudge.

“Thank you,” Renee said, “we need to find someone in the city.”

“Come upstairs,” Cora said. “Nevel, you get her bike.”

“But—but the other girl is back there, with a gun!”

“No, I’m here,” Bea said, “and hands-off.” She grabbed the bike that had been left against the wall. “You can put your gun away now, tough guy.”

“This is my tunnel,” Nevel said.

“Wacko,” Bea said as she passed him. Bea struggled both bikes up the basement stairs and huffed loudly.

From around his neck, Jamal removed the charm his mother had given him—a tiny metal Guan Yin figure, a small symbol of the disparate paths his parents chose. As his father tread deeper into being a junkie, his mother sifted through religions, thumbing through each as if browsing albu
ms to buy. In the end, she adopted Buddhism. It was no wonder in his mother’s absence Gregor had turned to tea ceremonies, the ritual a sort of communion with his dead wife.

“Here,” Jamal said, “I brought you something.” He uncurled Rick’s paw-hand and recurled it around the figure of Guan Yin. “Hello?” Jamal said. He nudged Rick’s shoulder. “I put something in your hand.”

Rick opened one eye and brought the tiny figure in front of it for inspection. “It’s a lady, right? She’s a little lady?”

“Yeah.”

Rick brought her closer to his wide bloodshot eye and inspected Guan Yin’s features. “She’s cute,” he said.

“She’s the Buddhist god of compassion. And mercy.”

“OK,” Rick said, and closed his eyes again.

“Hold on to her, you know, for, just hold on to her for now.” Jamal nodded and then the sound of a shot made him jump.

He crawled back to his window and inspected the street for signs of activity, and then asked Carl if he’d seen anything.

“I got that yellow house,” Carl called back.

“You see someone?”

There was no answer.

“Carl likes to shoot at things,” Rick said.

“It’s a house,” Jamal said.

“That’s a thing.”

“You hang in there, Rick.” Hours had passed and the strain of it was audible from the other room where Carl had begun to talk to himself in an unceasing whisper. There was no sign of their attackers and Jamal began to fantasize about simply walking out the door and biking home. His calf ached and he was hungry. There were three dead Rangers in the house and he hoped they weren’t going to add a fourth, or more, to the number.

He pulled out the stack of neighborhood notes and, hunkering in a squat, began to arrange them on the floor according to where the house was positioned in the neighborhood.

A terrific bang sounded from the room over and Jamal started and lost his balance and disrupted the system of notes he’d laid out.

“I got the house,” Carl said.

“Carl?” Jamal said. “Why don’t you take a nap? We’re going to be up all night here.”

“I resent that.”

Jamal waved his hands in the direction of Carl but couldn’t think what to say. “Why are you shooting the house?”

There was no answer and after the adrenalin seeped from him he turned back to the task at hand. He straightened the notes until he had nine blocks laid out, three blocks square, filling the room end to end. There were many missing squares from empty houses or where no message had come, so the blocks were patchwork. He started with the house they were in, a concrete building away from Woodlawn Park, with its charming playground and play-fountain, and the inevitable horde of boys who wanted to kill him—or at least him of the past, and now it seemed some of them were back at it. This neighborhood was a cesspool of anti-Jamalism, he thought. He wondered if this was the same war. Perhaps it’d never ended, just gotten drowsy for a few years. Perhaps his father’s enemy had respawned. He remembered Barstow had died some years back of a heart attack and a younger member of the gang had taken the lead. “Charles is in charge now,” read the note for this house. Who had lived here, he wondered, who had answered the door to relay the message to the water carrier? Where was their water carrier?

There was not much left of the house. Some broken furniture, and small heaps of discarded junk.

He had a note for the yellow house across the street: “Wants conference with M.M. about security.” And now, Jamal thought wryly, Carl is shooting up a justification for her. He read through all the others, thirty-three in all, some of them stacked several deep on the same house. There was only one other note on their street. “Says she saw a city cop in a regular car drive through. She’s old.”

He crawled back to the window and spotted where he believed this house to be, up near the top of the block, and pondered what a city cop’s business would be here.

“It’s not the blue house up the way, Carl,” he said, feeling fairly sure they weren’t being shot at by the old lady.

No answer came and he thought, not for the first time, that the man might have a pretty low sanity threshold and that perhaps, all corny humor and movie references aside, it might have been better, circumstances provided, to have switched one comrade for the other. Though there was a hell of a lot to be said for a wounded man who did not complain.

“How you doing, Rick?”

“Are we there yet?” His voice was barely audible.

“Don’t go anywhere without me.”

“I’d like some ice cream, vanilla is fine, or whatever.”

“When we get out we’ll get some. First thing.”

Jamal sat and watched the street. It’d be sundown shortly and he dreaded the night and felt certain Rick wouldn’t make it through. He crawled across the floor into the kitchen and beyond, into a large pantry, or perhaps where a washing machine would go, where the three Rangers were laid out next to each other, their bodies touching, their faces ashen, the smell of death not yet fully on them. He looked at the father; his face was swollen with bruises and his head tilted in a subtly odd manner on his neck and Jamal felt anger surge into him. Like a gasoline fire it raged out of nothing and burned hot and then was gone. Maybe they were fighting the city, he thought, maybe this was the frontline of a quiet war none of them knew had started. Then he wondered if the rest of the territory was all right, or if small invasions were happening everywhere. He steeled himself, knowing that to search the man’s clothes was something that must be done in the dimming light before nightfall.