Sherwood Nation: a novel

by Benjamin Parzybok

  Renee set Chris to work on creating an office for the house. She chose a medium-sized second story room across from where she slept, leaving for now the big room on the second floor empty. The office was not large—but perfect for private audiences. She’d churned the idea for the room about in her mind for a few days. First realizing she wanted it, then trying to get a feel for it, how it would look, the meaning it would impart to visitors. The office needed a big chair, an enormous chair to sit in, and a desk that spread nearly the width of the room. As if to say: Here everything is decided with the utmost solemnity. The office was spare and unadorned—though she amused herself with the thought of having Leroy scrawl I am the motherfucking queen of Egypt on the wall. On the desk she put a neat stack of blank paper on one side, and reserved a space for outgoing documents on the other side.

  When it was done she shooed curious volunteers out and closed the door behind them. The walls were scuffed white, the floor was scarred fir. For a moment, she laughed at the whole project, the preposterousness of an office with a slot for outgoing papers. She stared out of a window that looked down on the big backyard. Then she sat at the desk in the big chair and stared at the door and rehearsed, quietly, a voice that was beginning to surface, someone else that she’d had hiding inside of her all along.

  She thought about what Chris had said, the rumor that she was starting some kind of an organization. She pulled out a pencil and paper and wrote the word “OK” at the top of the page, and then double and triple-traced it. They needed water.

  She thought of Josh on his way up from Zach’s house. She put off the fear of what they must do. Wait until Josh came, and then they could case the trucks that smuggled water. Josh and she could get a crew together. She’d be the new Robin Hood. She’d be Maid Marian.

  Renee and Bea armed themselves and went scavenging for clothes. It was a mysterious process—standing in an abandoned house and sifting through clothes that had been strewn around like a great wind had whipped through the place. Sometimes there were feces on the floor or the remains of campfires. And the clothes: Bea picked up a few pieces until she found clothes that fit her and she was done. Renee picked up each piece and marveled at it, trying to parse out who it was she was becoming and to match up those branching possibilities with the shirt that dangled from her fingers. A cowboy shirt with plastic-pearl buttons? A green canvas shirt from some past war? A pink tank top, a black tank top, a dress? Was she dressing for herself or Maid Marian?

  She picked up something blue and satiny and shied away from a stain on it that could only be blood. Bea stood by and scarred a dresser top with the point of her knife. She sighed impatiently.

  “Stop it,” Renee snapped. “Go home if you want.”

  “No, I’m staying.”

  But Renee didn’t find anything in that house either.

  As they walked down the block they looked for signs a house was abandoned. A front door off its hinges, windows smashed out, but these signs were not always telling.

  At one such place, a small green house a block from their own, they stood on either side of the entrance and tried to peer in. The branches of a great dead tree did a poor job of shading the place. There was a screen door between them and the inside that had been spray painted black, the drips hardened into little black pearls. Through its few tiny holes it was too dim to see inside.

  “Hello?” Renee called in. “Is this house empty?” The words came out muddy, her syllables dulled by a dry tongue.

  There was no answer and they waited, listening.

  Renee nodded and Bea opened the door. They stepped into the gloom and waited for their eyes to adjust. Sitting in a rocking chair was an obese white man in his forties or fifties. He held a shotgun pointed at them and did not move.

  Renee screamed and dropped the few clothes she’d gathered—socks and underwear and a military beret. She turned and fled, banging back through the screen door and Bea followed.

  As she ran she waited for the gunshot but it did not come.

  They sprinted, panting with fear, back to the front of their own house and stood there in the street.

  “Dude,” Bea said, “don’t fucking scream.”

  Renee threw her hands up. “I didn’t! I mean don’t normally.” She paced back and forth. “Was he alive?”

  “Yes,” Bea bent to catch her breath. “I don’t know.”

  “We’ll have to send someone to check on him.”

  “No way I’m going back there,” Bea said.

  “Goddamnit,” Renee said. She sat on the porch and held her head in her hands. “If he isn’t, we can’t leave him there.” She went over the details in her mind. His eyes had been open, his head tilted just so. “What do we do?”

  “Nothing,” Bea said.

  “I have to know if he’s alive.”

  “You’ve got no survival instinct.”

  “Let’s go back.” Renee stood up.

  “Seriously,” Bea said. “Come on.”

  “Walk me back there, I’ve got to know.”

  Bea swore and stood up. They walked cautiously back to the house, spooked now, as if every house held a man in a rocking chair with a shotgun.

  Outside Renee snuck up to the side of the doorway while Bea stood out at the street.

  “Please,” Bea said one last time. “Don’t.”

  “Sir?” Renee said breathlessly through the screen door, keeping out of view. She worked at a piece of peeling paint in the doorframe with her thumbnail and felt an immobilizing wave of fear pass through her. She wanted to look into the dark room beyond but she couldn’t bring herself to do so. It was utterly silent inside. “Sir? I’m just checking on you. Making sure you’re OK. Just say something and I’ll go away.” There was no sound.

  She snuck a look inside then. He was in the same chair, still. A violent chill shook her and her teeth began to chatter. She opened the screen door and approached. She was shaking now and she clenched her teeth to keep them still. He was massive, with an enormous, mostly bald head and a fleshy face. His eyes were open. She thought maybe she saw him breathe and she stumbled sideways and crashed objects off of a coffee table. He wore a blue T-shirt and blue jeans, dust-covered and sweat-stained. His eyes did not track. “Sir?” she whispered. She wanted to touch him for a heart rate but each time she got close to his neck she pulled back. His eyes were sunken and rimmed with dark, and his skin slack, his lips parted. She settled on the shotgun, grabbing the barrel and pulling it from him slowly. It slipped from his hands. She didn’t judge its weight properly and the butt clattered on the ground. She leaned it against the door, and then checked the pulse at his neck. The skin felt odd to the touch, as if he were wrapped in wax paper, and it depressed as if the insides were hollowed out. There was no pulse. Renee backed away a few paces and leaned over. For a moment she thought she would vomit. “Bea!” she yelled.

  Renee grabbed the shotgun and stumbled outside. “Never mind,” she said. “Let’s go find a crew. We have to bury him.”

  “Ah,” Bea said.

  “Damnit,” Renee said. “Damnit.”

  They stood there at the end of the walkway for a moment. The neighborhood was quiet. And then about five houses down they heard what sounded like hammering. “I wonder if—his neighbors?” Renee said.

  “We’re not really on our feet here ourselves.” Bea eyed the house again.

  The hollow her fingers made in the man’s neck was stuck in her mind. She wiped her hand on her jeans again, and then again. “I know.” She shrugged. “I can’t leave him there.”

  His name was Harold, or at least the ID at his house claimed so. They buried Harry the Giant, as they’d taken to calling him, dubbing him with a friendly title to insulate them from the gruesome task. They dug four feet down into the dry earth, the best they could do before dark for the size o
f the hole. Someone turned up a cart for hauling lumber, and the lot of them, every resident of the house on Going Street, transported him out of his house and onto the cart and through the streets to the Rose City Cemetery. The task took most of a day, and they walked through the streets with him atop their cart like a tiny parade with one float. Renee felt people watch as they passed.

  For a moment, as they put Harry in the ground, she hovered between satisfaction and sadness. She wanted to spring up and search other houses for the dead. As if inside her were a bell, and having done one ennobling thing, that bell rang clear and loud and her body hummed with it.

  Later that night, with the job finished, she stood in her room and inspected each item of clothing she’d scavenged. Each had a memory to it, the ghost of its previous owner still inhabiting it. There was something wrong with all of them. They came from the past, from the dead and a dead era. As soon as possible, she resolved to have someone make her clothes. She needed to look it. Were she to be what they asked of her, chieftain of this new tribe, she needed to part ways with the past.

  In the end, she chose a black T-shirt that had a hole in its sleeve and blue jeans that had the worn mark of a wallet in the front pocket. Men’s jeans. For shoes, she’d had a lucky find in a pair of worn boots that thudded reassuringly against the wooden floor when she walked. They would know she was coming. The outfit would have to do for now.

  In the mirror behind her door she looked at herself. There was a long thin scratch down her right cheek that she had no memory of getting. The blood had smeared, starting bold and red and fanning out on the end like a comet.

  Downstairs, atop their listing table, someone had pencil-drawn a likeness of her. No body, just her face, the extra dark eyebrows, the twin braids she wore all the time now—the face looked sad, she thought, or angry, and yet there was an expression she didn’t understand. She stared at it self-consciously, as if come face-to-face with a living, breathing dopplegänger of herself, someone who might know her thoughts before she spoke them. There was a hardness about her.

  And then she realized it was not of her. It was a drawing of Maid Marian.

  Zach sat perched on the stone edge of his building’s top, a three-story drop to the sidewalk below him. A capricious, unsteady wind blew from all directions. Gusts of it pushed him this way and that. It was most apparent in the street below, where heaps of detritus that had rotted in place for weeks suddenly moved, rose Frankenstein-like from their resting places into cyclone characters that stumbled down the street, reanimated and careening, an instant army of the undead, until their life-sparks moved on and they settled back into newly rearranged piles.

  Dust particles bit at Zach’s face and stuck to him. He sighed and gripped the letter and sighted down the street toward the city where, later, he would be expected to show up at work. He thought about not going. He thought maybe he’d curl up and reread the letter all day.

  In the distance, to the east, the big mountains rose from the ground brown and lifeless—Mount Saint Helens and Mount Hood, and beyond, Mount Adams and Mount Rainier and Mount Jefferson, lost in a dust horizon. With the snow gone, they’d lost their beauty. Just looming piles of dirt now.

  Hey Boyfriend!

  So it’s been by my count ~8 days, aka 11,520 minutes (since I know these sorts of exacting numbers make you hot: 691,200 seconds, plus or minus, and every last one of them more dull/less good/more boring/less happy/more horny/less sexy) since I left your front porch and bicycled my way up here into the wasteland of the NE. Each of these days, for lack of Zach, I’ve had to share a bed with Bea, who snores not a little, I do not hesitate to inform you. And I’m not talking about the soft, thoughtful—even somnulent(sp?)-inducing—hum-buzz of my boyfriend’s snore, but a rip-roaring, jake-brakes outside your trailer home type snore, that rattles the window panes and makes your teeth chatter into rearrangement, bless the girl.

  In the morning, in front of the mirror, it is not unusual that this narrator needs to re-position her molars back to their starting gates. Just saying.

  How are you? I wish you could stop by to [redacted] me so [redacted] that I [redacted] all night making [redacted redacted redacted]. Right? I mean come on, how long must this separation last? With the dry tongue and the anxious looks over one’s shoulder and occasional—cannot deny, it must be told—masturbatory episodes in the rare moments of free time to oneself? How long?

  I think of you often down there conversing with my supposed-arch-enemy Monster Bartlett, explaining to him patiently how to save the people of our fair city while he ignores, nose pointed askew, hair glistening-hard and ready for take-off, the pointed dome of a space rocket that surely it is fashioned after. I know you’re fighting the good fight, and it makes me happy to think of you there.

  Things are going well here. For instance, today I went the whole day without withering into a broken pile of bone-flesh and tears, wasteful tears, need us not remind us. A good day really, with a sense of accomplishment. There’s much to tell. The “King of Egypt” (long story) is still providing some of his own rations, and others have chipped in too, whatnot and so on, so that we’re keeping sustained, if not rail-thin-thinking-of-one’s-hungers-non-stop. The curves you admired? Hope you like angles instead.

  Lots of nice folks up here, not saying there’s not. And lots to be sad about. I know you suggested I take up a hobby (idle hands do the devil’s etc) and hey! Does the finding and burying of dead people qualify? Is there accreditation? Small scholarly circles devoted to the study of? Society ladies gathering with the white wine and the foie gras and the shovels? Well anyway, I hope so, because I will have lots to share with and laugh about to said people when such hobby groups form, with hugs and the shedding of we’ve-all-been-there! type tears.

  No but seriously I’m kind of sick of all this and losing a sense of whatthehell I’m even ontheplanet to do. You have a handle on that for yourself or are these the type of questions a person doesn’t necessarily go down the road of asking oneself, for the possibility a person might discover that these are questions with no answers, like light bulbs with no sockets? Just tell me, I’ll take any old sort of answer.

  And so lastly, here I am here waiting for the, shall we say, subsequent parts of our relationship, as in the what-happens-next parts, where most likely I fly this coop, deciding that the burying of dead people is not the exciting up-and-coming hobby I thought it was, and head back down through the rough and tumble to your place, or you decide to give up on your career of mayoral counsel (but why, right? you have a job. I’m an outlaw, turns out) and come join me up in my Pharaoh’s lair. Odds are high on the former, things considered. Going to pretty much give it one last shot here, over the next few days, and then please be expecting me, wafer-thin, all angles and smiles, on your doorstop.

  W/love/and/so/much/more

  -r

  She pulled together a small group of six. Armed with the newly acquired shotgun and other implements, they traveled her neighborhood, introducing themselves to neighbors as the Sherwood Club. At each house she knocked tentatively, fearing only deadened ears listened on the other side, his or her heart long ago having given up whatever losing fight it fought. It was hard to sleep at night thinking of them, their eyes seeing nothing.

  When the wary “who is it?” called back, she became used to saying her assumed name in reply: “Maid Marian.” It grew easier on her tongue with each repetition.

  “We’re establishing neighborhood security.” A curtain would flicker, or the door’s peephole. She imagined the Sherwood Club as a citizen force, taking up slack for absent city services. A safety net for people who could not fend for themselves. Usually they let her in, knowing her from the news. Sitting on the edge of a chair in a family’s living room, she felt how they simultaneously leaned toward and away from her, hopeful and anxious, this idealist warrior—or criminal, was it?—terribly real
and in the flesh, in their homes. From them she learned of the bully down the street, who lurked at the perimeter of distribution, looking for water rations to steal like lunch money. She learned of the couple across the street who screamed at each other deep into the night, until the darkness filled with the sounds of glass breaking and things thrown and hurt. She made sure to speak at length to each house about their neighbors, for to know those around you, she thought, was to lose your fear of them. To bind your story to theirs. They were islands no longer, each of these houses, she was sewing them together.

  She tried to fix what problems she could. She held an impromptu court at the water bully’s house, inviting all of the neighbors from the block to show up and listen to him speak his crimes. The domestic-violence couple she invited to live under her roof, that they might be tempered by community, or separated if need be. Many problems, she found, only needed a slight bump to jar them from the hard track they followed, and many more were not in her power to affect. Like a halo it spread out from her house, she imagined, a ring of safety.

  But the deaths were hard. Three blocks from HQ they found a locked house with boarded-up windows. Bea used a crowbar to remove the wood from a window. Amid the squalor inside they found the bloated corpse of an old woman lying in bed. They wrapped her in her blankets and buried her in the cemetery. Among the items on her dresser Renee found a water identification card.