Sherwood Nation (46 page)

“Bind these men and take them back,” he said.

Jamal slowly let his breath out as the world snapped back into motion and the Rangers began to move again. He stared at the back of his father’s head. He was nauseous. He wondered if the executions had been for him, in retribution for his own supposed death. Jamal shuddered and turned to find two Rangers to help him put together a stretcher for Rick.

Renee and Zach slept until the sunlight was harsh in the room. The world outside was aglow with dust and it filtered through the air in the room. When she woke, Renee rolled onto him. She could feel the weight of responsibility coming back, the urgency to return to Sherwood as soon as possible and so she sought that which could take her mind away f
rom it for a moment. Her country was falling apart and she needed him there to help her decipher the data, or she needed to leave him. She could not waver in a limbo of escapism and responsibility-dodging any more, and with these thoughts on her mind, she did him as Maid Marian, so that Zach felt as if his hip bone were being ground into a thin powder, like she was mixing him up as some salve to be applied to her country. Her hands were like talons that cut into his wrists.

She understood that she’d gone to sleep next to him as one person and woken up as someone else.

When they were done, she breathed hard next to him and then quieted.

“So,” Zach said, feeling how radically things had changed in a few hours. “Where do we stand?”

“I don’t know,” Renee said. She sat up on the bed and faced away from him. “I have to go back to Sherwood tonight. You have to come with me.”

Zach marveled at how she had adopted the voice of command, how she rarely asked for opinion or preference. “No,” he said. “I can’t, Maid Marian,” he said.

He watched her turn toward him in anger. “Don’t call me—” she started, and then she turned forward again and was quiet.

They sat silent for a long while. He heard a siren drone by and then shouting in the street. It would soon be time to go pick up his ration. He stared at her naked back, lithe and strong, accustomed still to hard work, a back used to being the first to pick up and wield a shovel. Hair that fell past her shoulder blades, out of braids for once.

“Yesterday night, before we arrived, I signaled on the water tower. Did you see it?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t answer?”

“No.”

“But you were watching for it?”

“I was.”

“Do you still love me?” She turned to look at him.

Zach didn’t expect the question and he didn’t know who was asking it. “Do you?” he said.

She was still, and as she paused tension gathered into the room, each additional moment he desired to get up and flee. Then she nodded subtly. “Yes, I do.”

“OK,” he said, “OK.” He felt flustered and sat up quickly. He pulled his knees to his chest and drew the sheet tautly down over them. He toyed with saying he loved her back but he didn’t know. He was afraid of showing any soft spot that might get crushed. She glanced once back and turned away and then he knew he’d let her question lapse. He’d waited too long.

He wished he could reel back that moment when he could have said “I love you too” easily and without the complications of justifying or proving or explaining. He thought he did—the woman who arrived the night before and came up to his bed—he’d been happy to have her there. Happy—such a foreign word, such a mysterious contraption relationships were, of which he’d had as many as could be counted on one hand and leave enough fingers for going about their own business.

Renee dropped her head and began to do her braids. When she finished she put her palms against her temples. He wished she’d turn around now.

A wave of impish adolescence overtook him, a handy last resort for fleeing adult troubles and difficult emotional situations. He kicked her, landing a nudging insistent blow to her flank. She turned and gave him an irritated and disgusted look and he kicked her again.

“The fuck?” she said. She looked hurt and insulted and he kicked her again and then she pulled back and socked him in the thigh.

“Oh!” he called out and grabbed his leg, which convulsed with pain and then he kicked her again with both feet, strong enough to dislodge her from the edge of the bed.

“You fucker,” she said and stood up, and before she could walk from the room he leapt up, got his hands around her shoulders and pulled her down on top of him. She struggled to get away and he had to clutch at her back and hold on. She punched him in the side and again in the rib cage but the blows had softened. She took a bite of his shoulder and bit until he hollered out and then she let go and kissed him there and they were still.

It felt good to have her on top of him, a human blanket.

“I used to be able to hear birds out my window,” Zach said.

“Really?” she said, the statement obvious enough to her that she wondered if he was mentioning it as a symbol of some kind in their conversation, or just being nostalgic.

“Yeah.” He wrapped his arms around her lower back. “It’s complicated, Renee. I would like to be together. But I’m not sure there’s any room for that.”

She turned and put her head face down on his shoulder, her eyes an inch from the red bite mark there.

“You know?” he said.

“I’d like to try again,” she said.

“But is she up there? Is there a Renee in Sherwood?”

“I’ll figure it out,” she said. “I’ll make room for it, this relationship. That is what I want. I will make it formal. And in the quiet moments, it will be just Renee and Zach.”

He didn’t say anything and they lay there until they heard Señor Nombre call out and Bea clunking around and then he said OK.

Nevel and Cora sat down to watch the morning news with excitement. They had access to Sherwood now and there was a feeling of sudd
en dual-citizenship, of being able to travel to a paradisiacal island any time they wanted, and so with an extra thrill they sat to watch for any mentions of their new country.

There was a full-time Sherwood news crew now, a journalist and cameraman. When that night’s Sherwood segment showed, in the microsecond before the journalist spoke, before he knew the camera was running, you could see the grimness of the news on his face.

They watched and held hands as they saw live footage of Rangers searching houses. Sherwood citizens stood on the streets in their bathrobes as rangers went through their houses, house after house.

“They searched my house,” a woman who appeared disheveled and agitated said into the camera, and then turned to the journalist who interviewed her uncertainly.

“And the reason they gave you for the search?”

“They said they were looking for a fugitive. I had to stand outside while all these green goons went through my house.”

“I’m very sorry you had to suffer through that. Was anything damaged or taken?”

“No—” she turned to the camera—“can I take the green goons part back? Can you cut that?”

After the interview the journalist said they had contacted Maid Marian’s office for comment and received none so far.

The view switched back to the news anchors, who wanted to know what had happened to the people who were detained.

The journalist’s picture from a time past appeared in the upper right hand corner of the screen, looking plumper and more innocent, and the anchor faced toward that. “I haven’t heard about anyone detained,” Brian said, “but if there were—there are no jails. So these people would be pulled in to forced labor for the territory, or simply exiled. Sent to live in Portland.”

“But she wasn’t even there,” Cora said, “right?”

Nevel sunk into the couch, sensing that their hole into paradise was like a whirlpool in the center of their house, sucking them in. It was their escape hatch there, or their line to the underworld.

When they got downstairs Señor Nombre and Bea were cursing at each other and suddenly Renee didn’t want to go back. She sat at Zach’s table in his building and let h
erself be waited on, and zoned out all talk. She played out what leaving the territory for good would feel like.

Was there a president or king in the history of the world who just walked off the job? Surely a few. Ones who went back to waiting tables and making espresso? Gregor would assume control and that felt all right with her. It was his territory. She’d been flaky in the past, losing interest in school or projects or boyfriends and dropping them mid-way through, but the scale of this flakiness was monumental, standing-on-a-building’s-ledge huge, with the vertigo swaying you sickly, back and forth.

She pressed her forehead against the hard wooden tabletop and rested it there. She didn’t want to solve conflict after conflict, to provide for them all, to have in opposition the mayor and the Guard.

For a moment, in her mind, Renee lived in Zach’s house. She helped turn it into a micro-clinic, where good works were done and a difference was made. The stakes were so much smaller and she could be unequivocally good. There would be no punishments to mete out, levels of freedom to permit, and at night, each night, they could be alone together.

But everything changed after watching the morning news. Renee pounded around Zach’s house in a fury of preparation. The footage of Rangers searching houses burned in her mi
nd.

Renee set Bea to work building a mobile stretcher out of a hand cart, a sheet of plywood, and a lot of rope, cursing the necessity to take the incoherent patient for the time it would cost.

Gregor had crossed her. Had he so quickly gone crazy with power? Perhaps she would return to find the Rangers all turned against her. She wrote a list of items she wanted Zach to work on:

• Coup d’états, preventing
  
• Military allegiance
  
• Insights into data collected on informal power structures within the Rangers
  
• Jamal.
  

Would Jamal stick with her over his father? She worried what an allegiance either way would do to him.

Upstairs in Zach’s room she punched his pillow until her anger had worn down.

In the hallway she cornered Zach. “Are you ready?” She could feel the power of Maid Marian returning to her. Her doubts had been trivial. She would return and run her country, she would do the job justice.

Zach looked at her with exasperation. “That thing that Bea is making—I mean on a bike—”

“Oh, he’ll survive, and then we’ll be in Sherwood.”

In watching the news he’d remembered how miserable he’d been there, and he told her so.

“Yeah, I know,” Renee said and did not want to have this conversation. She backed away from him, the guilt and pressure of her multiple personalities making the hallway feel claustrophobic. She wanted to promise Zach again it would be different.

“But it won’t be. You know it’ll be the same,” Zach said.

“I don’t know that—”

“For me,” Zach said, “Renee—you—will always take precedence over that fucking country.” He felt remorse for having cursed it, the feel of blasphemy to it.

Renee looked down the hall and could hear Zach’s patient arguing fiercely with Bea. Señor Nombre had become garrulous in the face of his personal involvement in their trip north and ranted about the safety of hand carts and how he’d wouldn’t be getting in one any time soon and shouldn’t she use some wood glue there?

“What can I do?” she said. “Give me some options.”

“Come here,” he said. He pulled her to him. “Fucking Sherwood,” he said again. He thought—for probably the hundredth time—that perhaps she needed a man who might pick her up and take her to bed, a solid muscular man who didn’t emotionally bruise so easily, who stood straight and exuded confidence in interpersonal relationships and, sure, was a bit on the daft side. A figurehead of a man. A wooden dude to be mounted at the prow of her ship, a man who was not clear he was even mounted there.

He grabbed her ass and pulled her in closer and told her what he wanted, as if he were that man.

“I want to sleep in your room. I want one night a week with Renee—alone—where we don’t talk about Sherwood, I want your country to know about our relationship, and I want you to be monogamous.”

Renee seemed to cool and slip in his arms; she held very still and he knew there was a surf of guilt and indignation and righteousness that washed back and forth and he wondered which side of her it would reveal.

People had relationships, she thought. I am people, and thus . . . but it was difficult to picture pulling Zach up front of the Sherwood citizenry, to imagine his secondary public face, too. How many people would they be then? Did she protect him as her secret, or only hide him? Still, it was a nation for humans, and she was first among them. “I’m sorry,” she said finally, meaning, she thought, to apologize.

He clung to her, already regretting making any demands, but these things, he told himself, were not unreasonable. He deserved them.

He thought of the map room and the systems he had created. I am the architect, he told himself. He dropped his arms and stood straight and she leaned into him. This is mine to ask. He prepared to say he would not return.

“No, you’re right, I will promise those things,” she said. They were both quiet then in the agreement, but he couldn’t find the embrace they’d had, couldn’t get her back into the angle of intimacy. They kissed and she asked if he was coming now for sure and he said yes and she said thank you and unraveled from him and walked up the hall. He wondered if he’d broken it, if by merely stating what he wanted, he’d destroyed what he’d had, which admittedly had not been much in the first place.

He went to his room and sat on the edge of his bed feeling wasted and empty and began to think dully of what he’d need to pack.