Sherwood Nation: a novel

by Benjamin Parzybok

  Country-wide skills and education training

  Stage 2 “Weakness” goals

  Successful harvests

  Expanded trade

  Minimum balance of 500,000 gallons of water

  Country charter

  Elect council

  Stage 3 “Stability” goals

  Governmental transition based on work in stage 2

  The gradual reduction of my role

  Erect gargantuan statues of yours truly (joke!)

  How long will all this take? Considering the substantial progress we’ve made already, I believe these goals to be attainable within a year or two. We are currently estimating a 200−300% drop in crime rates. One week in. I am enormously proud of this.

  Pin this letter to your walls, my countrymen, and help me stay on task!

  Thanks for your attention,

  Maid Marian

  Normally, it was dangerous not to ride your bike, Jamal thought. Best to be getting from one place to another quickly. Walking was something you did in your house, or within view of your house. Jamal considered this as he held the saddle of his bike in the morning. If you were walking, your slowness subjected you to all kinds of possibilities. Bike gangs could circle you like flies around a cow. You could pick up hangers-on, people the drought had made not right, their neuroses honed to single weird obsessions that they shared relentlessly with you as you walked, trailing along at your elbow, always within a comment’s reach of rage. You could be ringed by child beggars, gangs of four or five or six who pecked at you for a sip of water and waited for you to show a weakness. Your route might radically lengthen by some impassable obstacle: a block fire, a wall of cyclone fence, fighting.

  He looked up his block and saw trash blowing along the street, but the wind was mild and didn’t carry enough dust to sting the eyes. The summer was at its height and he could feel the heat start to swell into the air, an itchy sweat in his scalp. In the old days before the drought he’d sometimes walk a day away. At thirteen, fourteen, fifteen—if you had nowhere to go and were desperate to leave the house, there was no better way to leave it all behind. He’d steal a pinch of dope from the stash, plug into headphones, and take his body elsewhere.

  He was curious, mostly. For the feel of it. They were an island now, ringed in by a sea. In a handful of days there’d been a dramatic change to the street-level safety in the neighborhood. At least it felt that way. He was due for work—what a foreign word that was to him—and he knew it was idiotic to walk from King to Cully neighborhoods with no escape vehicle. There’d been plenty of times he’d cycled hard away from a hail of stones or down a side street dodging pursuers. And he was no easy target.

  He gripped the saddle of his bike and pushed it along and decided to walk a ways. It was a little past dawn and the streets mostly slumbered still. He knew nearly every burnt-out house, and he planned his route to avoid them. They depressed him—permanent decay, like teeth lost to cavities. In the world they lived in, they would stay charred hulks. No house got rebuilt.

  But in the yards of many other houses, he observed the hole and tarp setup that marked a condensation trap. Another Sherwood project implemented via the volunteer force. Like a nation’s factories, he thought, there was industry there.

  A few blocks up, Jamal stopped in front of a house with blankets laid over their dust lawn. The habitants smiled cautiously at him as they scurried in and out their front door, bringing objects of every kind and laying them out in patterns on the blanket.

  “Everything OK?” Jamal asked a woman in her twenties in army cutoffs and a tank top.

  “Hello, Ranger! Yard sale, open everyday now.” She smiled. “Come on in.” She gestured with a sales flourish and a wink at their collection.

  Jamal wandered among the items, some on tables, some laid out on the ground in organized piles. For the most part it was ordinary garage sale fare—from the old days—for white roommates in their twenties: books and records and electronics, toasters and silverware, trinkets, movie posters, a spattering of unlikely furniture, cables that no longer had a place to plug into, semi-used art supplies, clothing of various discarded fashions. There was a heap of greenish cloth with a sign that poked out: “National Pride!” In it he found a pair of children’s army-green walkie-talkies, the price marked both in US Dollars and water units, but the batteries had been robbed from them long ago and the chance of obtaining more was slim. He hovered over a handsome accordion with shiny ivory keys and a case with purple velvet lining until a bone-skinny man with a thick beard called out from the doorway that it wasn’t for sale. The bearded man, shirtless and dressed in some kind of—Jamal didn’t know, circus pants?—brought out a lawn chair and parked it next to the accordion, and then began to play a mournful tune. Jamal felt a brief nostalgia for an old Portland, or rather not his old Portland, rife with dime bags and family power, but the city’s self image. With its sea of whimsical musicians and artists, bike shops and gluten-free bakeries, living up to the nation’s stereotype of them, at least on the surface, before need and fear had either driven them away or made them serious.

  There was a whole spread of makeshift weapons, fashioned largely from broom handles, duct tape, and nails.

  “Very cheap,” the girl said.

  “You made them?” He’d seen the style.

  “Yeah, we made them, we used them,” she said quietly. She pointed up the block where a woman dressed in Ranger green sat in a lawn chair at the intersection. “But, you know? Somebody is there all the time. We don’t need so many anymore.”

  Jamal stared up the street and wondered if he knew the Ranger. Cops had inspired scorn and hatred in him before, but here he was, dressed same as her.

  “They’d look good on you, Mister,” the woman said about the weapons. “I could strap one to your back like a samurai. Very handsome,” she said wryly.

  Jamal chuckled. “How much?”

  “For you, a unit each. You could strap them to your handlebars like horns. It’s in style, big time.”

  “You’re a hard sell,” he said.

  She curtsied. “I’ll go get a measure.”

  He picked out two and talked her into finding some more tape in order to attach them to his bike. She took the job seriously, and he could see that in the way she’d worked, she’d once done this scared, that at one time they’d huddled in their basement fabricating weapons. After she finished, she admired her work. They were tightly holstered there but could be pulled off in need.

  “Thank you,” he said. He pulled out his canteen and poured two units into her unit measure and admired the enterprise.

  At Alberta Park he stopped and watched the farming operation. The fields were tiny, using as little water as possible, and he couldn’t imagine that they would do more than provide a slice of carrot to each. It’d be one proud carrot, however.

  A sign asked for unit donations and for the second time he pulled out his canteen and, after being directed by the gardener, planted the two seeds that were given to him and split a unit over the seeds once they were in the ground. He admired the dribbles he’d made over each of the plantings. The gardener placed small plastic bottles cut in half over each of the seeds. These were his to care for now. I’ve got a stake planted down, he thought. Roots here.

  He shared the road with many other walkers and bikers. There was a new feeling everywhere, an industriousness, as people looked up from their misery after a few days straight of peace and began to pick together scraps of their lives. There were goods to be sold, projects to work on, Sherwood volunteer work to be done, water to be delivered.

  By the time he arrived at HQ, his body was vibrating with hope.

  Zach made a paper representation of their water supply. On a piece of paper he drew a large box with a Sharpie and labeled it “Wate
r Supply (100,000 gallons).” Then he placed a piece of paper he’d colored with blue crayon inside of the box, adjusting the level by sliding the blue paper up and down through a slit in the bottom of the paper. He pinned the thing to the wall and he and the two Rangers who’d been assigned to help him admired his work. It was about as rudimentary as it came. Each morning he instructed his employees to check the supply in the various tanks throughout the territory with a bamboo pole.

  He made indicators for money and the number of Green Rangers. He created an arm-span-sized map of all Sherwood that he outlined neighborhood by neighborhood. Over these he pinned colored indicators that he fashioned out of construction paper. Fire, gunshots, death, sickness, news van, rioting, city, unrest, party, miscellaneous. He could use the stream of incoming news and pin a visual representation to this map, so that a quick glance could show where the trouble was. He wanted them all to know exactly where they stood, and he was assigned the manpower to tally and change his meters. Over time he would graph them all and compare them to a history of policy decisions.

  He quickly realized they took delivery of enough extra water per day in taxes and through other sources that they had an excess, and so he advised that they sell water on the city’s black market. A single unit of water fetched between twenty-five cents and a dollar, depending upon the news and whatever crisis was in vogue that week. At forty units per gallon, this made an excellent ongoing base for the economy, but it was not enough.

  As Zach fretted over the figures at the big table in the map room, other Sherwood Rangers and officials busied about behind him.

  “We need taxes, Renee,” he said as she sat down next to him. “That’s how all governments work.”

  “We have taxes—”

  “I mean more than two units—we need them to pay. You can’t run clinics and farms and schools on nothing.”

  Gregor leaned into the table and crossed his arms. He still made Zach uneasy. In the transition from drug lord to general of the Sherwood army, very little seemed to have changed. He wore the same V-neck sweater most days and never donned a uniform. He moved like some great, lazy cat, languidly carrying his belly weight. When they’d had a conflict on the western border with the city, Zach had been startled at the speed with which the man could jump to action. Gregor served tea often—pulling off of the water bank liberally to do so. Indeed, tea ceremony, and more simply water ceremony, had become a part of Sherwood culture.

  “Can you imagine?” Renee said in agitation. “We go from robbing from the rich to give to the poor, to charging them double taxes all in the space of what, a couple weeks? The irony would cause riots. Nottingham!” she called and raised her fist in mockery.

  “The Rangers need money if they’re going to stay on,” Gregor said. “An idea only gets you so far. When that runs out, you have mass defections.”

  “Sure, hey, let’s draw their blood too. We’ll arm the water carriers with syringes.”

  “Renee—” Zach said.

  “Marian,” she said.

  He was allowed to call her Renee in private only. He exhaled and they all stared at the center of the table for a moment.

  Somehow the thought of paying her Rangers had been a blind spot. There was something distasteful about the whole affair, and not for the first time that week did she long for the simplicity of being outside the law, fighting with a small band of believers. But admittedly, the sight of the Rangers out her window in the morning gave her a sort of happiness, a power and comfort. Dressed in green, like the yard of grass that ought to be below her.

  “We can’t pay as we would in non-drought times,” Zach said, “but they’ve got families and bills. Some will drop out, others will join. How about we start them at thirty dollars a day. I can make a budget for that.”

  “Forty,” Gregor said.

  “Thirty-five,” Zach said. “We can’t hamstring ourself with more. Thirty-five with a potential weekly bonus. Put them on four-day work weeks. Depending upon the size of the force, that’s eight to twelve thousand dollars a day.”

  “Every day?” Renee said. “Is that even possible?”

  “Every single day. That’s why we need taxes.”

  “Absolutely not,” Renee said. “Can’t they pay to get out of mandatory volunteer work?”

  Zach snorted, “Every time you say mandatory volunteer I feel a little sick. Wait, what?” On paper he began to work through the math. “Say it costs, what, fifteen dollars? To get out of your one volunteer day?” Zach bounced his leg and scratched out the plan on paper. It was a massive number of potential volunteers, even after removing children and elders. Management of a fresh workforce of six or seven hundred volunteers on a daily basis was going to be an immense and interesting problem. “The percentage who pay will be a minority, but still I’d guess those would be decent revenues. With that alone we could hire one to two hundred Rangers a month. And I don’t think we let them opt out every time.”

  Renee nodded, satisfied. She’d learned to move quickly on after decisions, and to rely on others to implement. There were so many systems to create. “Then we do it. Zach, draw up the policy. Gregor, put someone in charge.” She pounded her fist once on the table and smiled. “You people are geniuses. Progress, people!”

  As she departed, on to the next task, she let her hand trail along Zach’s back and hoped he would feel in the caress an apology.

  She was of two minds now, and one tinkered on in the background, observing what the other did, while the other commanded a country. She took to carrying a knife around. It was a thin-bladed fish boning knife, sharp as a razor. It had a subtle curve, like a miniature saber, and a solid plastic handle. The six-inch blade locked into a plastic sheath, and she wore it attached to her belt. She wore the knife parallel to the belt, in place of where a belt buckle would be, so that it took a moment’s observation to see that she was indeed armed. She did not wear it for show or to deter; she wore it because she was afraid.

  She woke that morning out of a dream where soldiers stood around her bed—US Marines—shooting into her, and she’d looked up at them calmly, as she felt the blood drain from her body. It’d been a surprise to feel along her stomach after she’d woken and find nothing. No blood, no unnatural holes she could dip her index finger into. She lay in bed and let life return to her, trying to push away the feeling of impending doom.

  “These are no end-times,” she whispered into the room. It was a mantra she’d taken up since her first night in Sherwood. A poem of sorts that had taken shape in her head, the words reeling out of her. “These are no end-times. This time is simply a tunnel, from one time to the next. I work here to see us through. The darkness is a passage.”

  It was with great strength that she blotted from her mind the end of the mantra, a new addition: “I do not seed the violence.” The last part began to show up on her lips, materializing there out of deep subconscious, tacked on to the end of the mantra unbidden.

  “Who said anything about violence?” Renee said aloud. Bea was gone, her bed meticulously made. A single shaft of dawn from the east made it through her north-facing window and burned orange against the west wall. Water, food, security, health, education. That’s what she did. And yet? She leaned up out of bed and looked down into the backyard and saw, as always, the small army there, rifles on their shoulders, pistols on their belts, Jamal in their midst, and she shuddered.

  Renee divvied her own water share. Her Ranger-delivered unit gallon—minus one tax-unit—had been left at her door. The remaining 39 units—each one fortieth of a gallon of water—were divided between six task-based gallon jugs, old glass apple juice containers. Water to drink: 18 units. To cook with: 10 units. Cleaning: 4 units. Hygiene: 4 units,. Miscellaneous (a plant she had on her window sill, a luxury, the occasional wetted handkerchief to wipe her brow, etc): 1 unit. Charity: 1 unit. Savings: 1 unit. She stared
at the portion she’d parted away for cleaning and it looked trivially small. Just over twelve ounces of water. She hungered for a shower and a way to properly wash her hair. But above all, she thought, she must live as she asked others to live.

  She breathed in the smell of the water, taking pleasure from its many mysterious sounds, the way a quantity of it sounded in a glass jug, glunk, glunk, or the way the glass rang with the water inside when touched with the blade of her knife. She could delegate this, but divvying water was a vital ritual, a uniting one. She imagined herself performing the task in synchronicity with everyone else in Sherwood, like a morning prayer.

  Today she would work on the clinics. She’d find doctors and nurses who understood her, who knew that these were not end-times, who may be persuaded to work locally and not in the hospitals. In her entire territory there had not been a single doctor’s office, and so she would need to find and pay for equipment and medicine. Nearly every day they carried bodies to the Rose City cemetery. People who had died because of dysentery or bloodshed, dehydration-related symptoms, old age, or the relentlessly boring pace of an apocalypse in slow motion. Fewer died than before she’d come, she reminded herself. They dug holes where they could find the space. She’d been to more than a few of these, wielding a shovel and talking to families and drawing off some of the hate and grief and taking it into herself. Afterwards the survivors told their friends and family that Maid Marian had come to the funeral and wept, and her renown deepened. Time is simply a tunnel, she told herself, from one time to the next. There is no end, there are no end-times.