Sherwood Nation (20 page)

Balls!

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W/so/much/love: -r (MM)

Gregor sat on his raised wooden front porch in an old rocker and stared out into the neighborhood. There were many smells in the air—rot; the dry, stifling smel
l of dust, smoke from something that should not burn, a car perhaps. He did not flatter himself that he could, as the saying went, smell change, but there it was, clear on the air, an edge that insinuated a new front. It was an indefinable wisp, a whisper of something else in the decay of the drought. With the stem of the pipe he carried with him but did not smoke he tapped out a rhythm on the arm of the chair. Or perhaps, he thought, it was simply the perspective with which one inhaled. Not an external scent, but an internal revision.

He called to his man on the porch for a cup of tea, and the message was passed into the house. There was always someone with him. He was not without enemies, and he was not incautious.

It was probably too hot for tea, but the tiny cups—served in sake-like earthen mugs—hardly warmed one, and they helped him think.

Jamal had been with Maid Marian for a few weeks now, he’d learned. The converted. That was fine, the presence of Jamal would keep Gregor in her thoughts. Her organization grew every day, Jamal told him. A small army of fresh workers showed up at her house. Word of her spread across the neighborhoods. A day did not go by when he didn’t hear at least one weirdly enthusiastic account of her. He still could not understand how she held sway over others—other than they so desperately needed someone to believe in. By all accounts she was doing what she had claimed she’d do, that day in his house, with a touch of insolence. Perhaps, he thought, tapping his pipe on the arm of his chair, he’d been hasty to dismiss her. But no.

How was she not yet in city hands? Did they think her too hot to handle? They must be willfully ignoring her, he thought, hoping her plan might fizzle into complicated community politics, or be overly burdened by the dull routine of survival. Perhaps they did not yet realize it was survival that birthed such plans. Perhaps they did not know about the truck.

It was a silly pot to throw in with. After all these years of running a successful business, he was comfortable and could obtain what he wanted, could provide for those he cared for. But if change were upon them, if she were going to challenge the city for the whole of the Northeast, then he would inevitably be involved, on one side or the other. It was a trap she’d laid for him. She was choosing a general, and it could either be him, or not him. A binary choice, and the implications of each spun out in terrifying fractals.

He sipped the tea and scratched at his beard with his pipe. There was no possible way he would be allowed to coexist with a power that bound all the neighborhoods together. Already her organization was many times the size of his, sprawling and absorbing.

Gregor watched as a bicyclist rounded the block at the corner and shot toward him. It was Jamal, riding at breakneck speed, as always. Jamal picked up the bike and leapt up the steps.

“Pop,” he said and grinned. Jamal grabbed a rocker beside his father after he’d leaned his bike against the wall. He panted from the ride.

“Hey boy,” Gregor said fondly. He’d enjoyed watching Jamal change over the course of the drought. He’d transformed from a softer, bookish early twenties to a ropey confidence over the last few years, so that Gregor, though he was loath to admit it to Jamal, would trust him with most anything. “News?”

Jamal shrugged and took a pull off his canteen. Gregor motioned for his man on the porch to bring another tea but Jamal stood and said he’d fix his own.

When he returned he’d regained his breathing and sat on a wooden chair with his small cup. “They’re making an army.”

Gregor eyed him. “You mean, you’re making an army.” That Jamal had fallen in with her organization so deeply was a troublesome bit. The trap she’d built for him was complex indeed.

“Yeah.” Jamal gave him an elusive smile.

“Anybody we know?”

“A few familiar faces, but nobody that big yet.”

“You. They’ve got you.”

“Yes,” Jamal said. “They have me.”

Jamal turned and Gregor felt the boy search his face, his two steely drill-bit eyes aimed deep into his cerebrum. He could see what the look meant. Jamal had chosen a new leader and didn’t know how dangerous it was for their relationship. He could see how the boy was hooked, how he’d always been a dreamer and an idealist, that he’d done the family business only because he’d been born into it. Because there was the shared loss of the other half of their family, mother and brother, that kept the remaining father and son inseparable.

“Come on, Pop.” Jamal turned away and watched the street. “Everything’s changing, man.”

Jamal sipped his tea and watched a couple of guys push a burdened shopping cart with a stuck wheel down the street. Their bodies bent at severe angles behind in order to push. They knew better than to come calling at Gregor’s house. “They’re talking about things like farms and schools.”

“Farms,” Gregor said and smiled, the word felt like some relic from the past and flooded him with nostalgia. They hadn’t dared leave the city for more than a year, but there were no more farms out there. No fields of apple trees, no vineyards, no peaches. He’d taken Jamal and his brother to the U-Pick strawberry farms when they were children. The whole memory floated intact and unreal in him as if a dream. He’d been high, of course, but still it was one of the few times in his memory he was proud of his parenting. They’d settled into a sort of comfortable rhythm for an afternoon, the three of them on their knees eating strawberries straight off the bushes, not bothering to save any to their baskets, their hands covered in juice, the berries giving them a prolonged closeness. Last he remembered, there’d been a series of water rights uprisings as farms died. A lot of blood was spilled. “And the city?”

“They tried one raid before I got there. Nothing else. They either don’t know or feel like it’s too risky with the status she’s built. Her people disappear her when they need to.”

“Hm,” Gregor said.

“It means a lot to me, Pop.”

A Hispanic boy of eleven or twelve approached and Gregor’s guard intercepted him.

“I’m here for Pedro,” he squealed, as the guard blocked his way.

“Where’s Pedro?” Gregor said.

“Pedro’s dead,” the boy said.

“Let him by,” Gregor said. “Explain your story quickly, boy.”

Jamal closed his eyes and sank into his chair and felt sick of the whole thing. Every last needy fucking user, the rampant stupidity of the entire network. It was a different kind of power that Maid Marian wielded, and he found himself pulled toward it, his thoughts like iron filings toward a magnet.

After the boy had left they were quiet. Jamal hadn’t heard every word but could sense his father’s anger. Something about an altercation between Pedro, a runner, and a user, and then Pedro’s son showing up to support the family in his stead. Depressing, but a gratingly boring story for its redundancy. Each of these incidents riled Gregor—he liked smoothly functioning machinery, a system at peace with itself—but to Jamal, it was the same inevitable incident occurring over and over.

“Pop?”

“Don’t. I know what you’re going to say,” Gregor said. The problem with Jamal, Gregor thought, is that he believes things really change. He believes that it really is an end-time, an end-time that allows for the reinvention of everything. A whirl of dust and debris blew down the street in front of them. And so: Was it? Would his inability to see that change break him in the end?

He pondered bringing up the water truck heist, about which they’d fought virulently. The boy was going to get himself killed, and that was one reason to ponder things. Somehow they’d pulled it off, despite a half-baked plan. She was wealthy now.

“It’s time to decide,” Jamal said.

“No, not yet.”

“Shit or get off the pot.”

“There’s time still.”

Jamal finished his tea and leaned his head back against the house. “No,” he said firmly. “There’s no more time.”

Renee sat on the floor of her room with Bea across from her. They’d found a cribbage board and cards and had been dealing games since. It felt good to have the distraction, and they played in a giddy, amped manner, calling out their wins and smack-talking each other.

Bea looked good to her, sittin
g cross-legged with a fan of cards on her knee. She was backlit and her hair shown a golden-red on her head, the freckles across her face like a paint-spraying of summer.

In here, they were safe, and the world she’d spun into motion moved outside the door without her.

“Fifteen for two, fifteen for six, and a pair makes eight,
sucker
,” Bea said.

Renee dealt out the cards and thought about going to the tower to talk to Zach. She needed someone with whom she could strategize. There were those who trusted what you did, and those who followed blindly, and those who made suggestions, but with Josh gone she didn’t feel like she had anyone scheming on the same level, arguing and contradicting her. Could Gregor? she wondered. She had made a fool of herself in front of him, she thought, she had over-extended and squandered the opportunity for a genuine ally. She reached into her pocket and fingered the green laser there.

“You put down the crib?”

“Sorry?” Renee said.

“Dude.”

There was a knock at the door and they stared at each other for a brief moment before Renee yelled come in. It was Jamal. Renee invited him to come sit with them.

“Cribbage,” he said.

“You should take my spot,” Renee said.

“She’s thinking about your dad,” Bea said.

Jamal nodded. He opened and closed the palm that held his list of things-to-do, permanent-markered there in black. At the top was:
Pop
.

“Chances?” Renee said.

Jamal shrugged. “I worked on him, and . . . I’ll keep working on him.”

“We don’t have much time,” Renee said and stared at her cards, confused as to where she’d left off with the game. “We’re getting noticed. We’ve got a tank of water burning holes in our backyard. I need to make a decision. If Gregor isn’t going to do it, it’s got to be someone else. Link, Martin, Salzar, Charles.” She shrugged. “I haven’t decided who’s next.” They were not, the rest of them, a basket of Easter eggs from which any choice might be pretty, more like deer droppings, or worse. She needed someone with a deep history here, a wisdom and influence. There was just the one that might work, and the rest she wasn’t sure she should bother with.

Jamal nodded. Hearing those names brought a flush of heat to his face. If any of them did come in, there would be some talking to do. He wondered if he could fight against his own father. But he’d made his choice. You could not make an allegiance to a family-run drug trade. There was no idea there, there was nothing to swear to. He balled his fist, closing the to-do list from view. “How much time?”

“Twenty-four hours,” Renee said.

“Is anyone even playing?” Bea said.

“I’ll play. I’ll totally play,” Jamal said.

Renee handed him her cards. “I’m lost here, you take mine.”

“I warn you, no one’s more lucky,” Jamal said.

Renee swallowed hard at this as she made way for him. She had firsthand proof of Jamal’s luckiness.

“And also, I cheat.” He shrugged as if that were just the way things were.

Renee lay back on the cot and listened to the two play and decided to give herself two minutes there. After the recruitment of a strong arm, the number and scope of items that had to be done was dizzying.
Lieutenants,
she said to herself, the word arising up from some Napoleonic history lesson, conjuring up someone who might wear tassels on his suit coat and carry a saber and wear a handlebar mustache, which Bea would look nice with. She chuckled at the thought and could hear the two of them pause to look over at her. The smell of their unwashed bodies was rank in the room.
Lieutenants
playing cribbage. She loved them, and loved listening to their game banter, manifesting in counting and cursing at each other:
fifteen two fifteen four a run for three makes seven. And the crib—fuck. really? fuck—that’s right, for fourteen.
Lieutenants she had put in terrible danger and was on the verge of doing again, digging their hole deeper, and this sobered her so that her muscles locked in place, frozen, with her breath held.
She
was the one playing the game, the one pushing the all-in bet into the middle of the table, gambling them like chips.

Gregor decided to go there himself. If you were going to do this sort of thing, you didn’t call her to you. He knew that. For the first time in a long time, the roles were reversed.

He didn’t leave the house much anymore and felt odd preparing himself for the out-of-doors. He sent people scurrying about in front of him: prepare his bike, find his clothes, tell her he’s comin
g.

When he was finally on his bike in the front yard he looked up at the neighboring houses, trying to remember which unfortunate interactions he’d had with each. Which were his allies, which not. He felt a sort of mortification. Like a man raised from his tomb into a different time, blinking into the sun. Gone soft and dead in the interminable years.