Sherwood Nation: a novel

by Benjamin Parzybok

  “Hey now, listen. You wouldn’t believe how busy—”

  “Not accusing!” Jamal said. “Trying to scope the situation here is all. And Maid Marian?”

  “She’s in her office, business as usual.”

  “But you’re not giving her reports?”

  “Leroy and I are doing the motherfucking best we can here, Jamal.”

  “I’m not on your case, Bea. My father know about this?”

  “He knows.”

  “I didn’t realize it was so—”

  “It’s complex, trust me.”

  There was a sound at the door and a Ranger dropped off a stack of notes in the incoming box. “Woodlawn,” he said.

  “Ah! I’ll take a look at those,” Jamal said, very happy to have some direction other than the conversation he was having with Bea. He knew Bea well enough from practice with the Going Street Brigade a couple of times a week. She did firearms practice, obstacle course, running, fighting. She was driven and hardcore and would make an excellent soldier, though she ran a little hot. He’d thought of her as uncomplaining, if a little hostile, until now.

  He retrieved several disordered stacks of notes from the Woodlawn section and made his way to the couch.

  There were about eighteen hundred houses in Woodlawn, twelve hundred of them occupied, and to him it seemed as though they’d received notes from about a third of them. He flipped through, trying to make sense of the handwriting and somewhat cryptic nature of the notes.

  6241 14th—O.H. collapsed middle of night, needs repair

  “What’s O.H.?”

  “Outhouse,” Bea said.

  6255 14th—Wants to knw when school will open

  6311 14th—has 5 gal gas 2 donate. He will talk ear off.

  6322 14th—Thinks she has poison oak..??

  6331 14th—Complains man in 6311 left garbage in his yrd.

  “This is ridiculous. Why are we getting so much information?” Jamal said. “Do we take care of this crap?”

  “Renee wants everybody to feel heard.”

  Jamal had a better sense of how the job might make you feel like that 3 a.m. diner waitress. He flipped through each one until he found a note that said, “Wants me to tell M.M. Charles is in charge now—? Was insistent.”

  Jamal thumbed the edge of the note and reread it. 6722 12th. Close to the park, which had always had a dark edge to it. Charles in charge. Did he know any Charleses? He slipped the note in his pocket and put the rest back in incoming under the hot glare of Bea.

  “Is he coming back?” he said.

  Bea put up a hand. “Fuck if I know.”

  Jamal took a step out the door. “Weren’t he and Maid Marian?”

  Bea frowned and shook her head no and then appeared to change her mind and nod yes.

  Jamal and two of the Going Street Brigade rode down the once tree-lined Ainsworth Street toward Woodlawn neighborhood. They carried handguns only, tucked away inconspicuously. Jamal didn’t want them spotted carrying rifles. They wore no uniforms. They were just three men on bikes.

  He’d chosen the two men based on their competence, though he knew they didn’t find terribly much to like in each other, though at one time they must have appraised each other’s skills and come to correct assumptions. You really didn’t know a man’s true skills until he was out and under fire, Jamal thought. Rick was a white guy, an Iraq veteran. He was gung-ho and fleshy—beefy—in that US soldier way, though reduced water and food intake had certainly pared him down some. He felt decidedly American to Jamal, with a corny sense of humor, oafish veneer, and a firm sense of what he believed to be right and wrong. He was quick to deduce a situation and, when a situation turned serious, he became someone else entirely, subtle and professional.

  The other man, Carl, was a defected police officer. He was in his forties and hypercompetitive, a not entirely stable man, given to holding silent grudges or making unwarranted hostile remarks, but over time Jamal had found him one of the most competent of the brigade, who, because he’d been born and raised there, had a deep understanding of the issues of the neighborhood.

  As they rode they passed the work of the territory. A crowd of people were gathered at the grocery store on 33rd and Killingsworth, repairing the windows and cleaning the place up—quite inefficiently, from the looks of it. As with any project there were probably four times the needed number of workers. Maid Marian wanted people busy, he knew. She wanted them all to feel wanted and useful and to have a stake in things, even if it meant a mob showed up to build an outhouse. The dead trees that lined Ainsworth Street were being cut down to provide firewood for the winter ahead. Jamal spotted water carriers and the occasional Ranger.

  Woodlawn neighborhood was quiet as they weaved their way through its blocks, looking for a place to start. They spotted a water carrier team, and Jamal pulled them over. He wondered about two white girls in this, of all neighborhoods, mostly black and with its history of violence. Or perhaps this was only his history. He told them they were Rangers, and saw that they recognized him.

  He saw their own Ranger come into view at the end of the block and start walking toward them—water carriers were supposed to be under line-of-sight protection at all times. “We’re out of uniform,” Jamal said.

  “Obviously,” one of them said. She was tall and thin, like a length of board. “Have you got the password?”

  As a security precaution, there was a daily password haiku displayed at Sherwood headquarters. Rangers were required to speak this to each other. If you had not been through HQ on that day, you had no authority. It was not a tremendous security measure, but it gave a sense of formality and dignity to interactions and reminded them all to be vigilant.

  Jamal leaned in close to the thin girl and whispered that day’s pass-phrase haiku into her ear: “There is only one, for which all life does depend, the sun is a fire.”

  The closeness made him desire to lean in further and kiss her neck. And he saw a similar reaction in her, namely: in a whispered pass-phrase something sexy, but mostly weird, had happened deep in the territory of each other’s personal space. Perhaps he should have said it aloud, he thought.

  She signaled an “OK” up the street to her Ranger.

  Jamal asked her about the route and if she’d felt or seen anything unusual.

  “Everything is fine,” she said, “unless you say it’s not.”

  Jamal showed her three photos, each with a label bearing a name, and asked if she’d known them. They’d already been to each of the Rangers’ residences to make sure that no inebriation was being slept off, and it was there they’d obtained a photo of each, but the three—all black men in their twenties—were unaccounted for. One of them had a family and two children and the wife was justifiably worried.

  “I know all three,” the first girl said. “They’re Woodlawn Rangers. This one”—she tapped a picture of a wide-smiling boy, barely twenty—“he’s our Ranger sometimes: Robby. What’s up?”

  Jamal shrugged. “We’re looking for them—you seen them recently?”

  “Sure, last day or two.”

  “Which is it, one day or two?”

  She shrugged. “We don’t always see them up close.” She turned to her partner.

  “Two days,” the second girl said. “I noticed the shift changed up. Some of the other water carriers have new Rangers. And that Ranger”—she waved in the direction of their ranger, a block away—“isn’t our normal.”

  “And there’s been no rumors or talk?”

  “I assumed HQ switched things up. We don’t talk to them much on the job.”

  The first girl pointed to the photo of the man who was a father. “I talk to him sometimes,” she said. “We talk about kids. He cycles back with me sometimes. We live near each other.”

 
“And the last place you saw him?”

  “Crossing Woodlawn Park, probably.”

  Jamal swore. That goddamn park would be the end of him. “Thanks,” he said, “we’ll nose around there.” He smiled at the first girl whose ear he’d recently whispered a haiku into, and she smiled back. “We’ll catch you around then,” he said. For him, as of yet, the Sherwood revolution had been an utter failure on the sexual front. Rumor was, everyone else was fucking like rabbits. He’d noticed all sorts of sly, lingering looks and unintelligible jokes passing back and forth in his Going Street Brigade, where he spent the majority of his time, but as captain he was kept in the dark.

  On 12th near Woodlawn Park the streets were silent. They got off their bikes and walked and Jamal felt spooked. There was something not quite right but he couldn’t place what. He had memories of trick-or-treating in this neighborhood, and later of the war he’d fought up here with his father’s people against Barstow. The memories unnerved him. Maybe no one lived in these houses. He studied them and they looked like others everywhere—dead trees, a coating of dust and grime covering them. There were many broken windows; the riots had been intense here.

  “Quiet,” he said.

  They stopped and Jamal dug out his canteen and passed it around. They each took a swallow. He opened a US government rations nut bar and divvied it in thirds and passed it around.

  They stood with their bikes under the wiry skeleton of what was once a great tree, the kind which he could no longer identify.

  Jamal remembered the water carrier notes and he pulled out the note that read Charles is in charge here now. The house was at the end of the block, up on a rise, with a commercial shop butting up against it.

  In charge of what, he wondered. The house? The block? The neighborhood? He looked around for Rangers or water carriers or citizens and saw none. It struck him as unsettling. Jamal pulled out his phone but there was no signal. It was an old habit from another time, though he still kept it charged, when he could. The time read 1:19.

  Zach lay on his back amid the dried ruins of his rooftop vegetable garden and stared at the wispy clouds passing overhead. They were like great ships passing by, refusing to stop at their lonely port. They danced about up there, the tendrils of water vapor curling about in the atmosphere, doing their own rain dance.

  It was vexing to watch all that water pass by above. What need did the sky have while the land went without? Perhaps they were simply a victim in someone else’s war, a feud between the earth and sky.

  On the street he heard a couple of quick gunshots in succession and his hair prickled and he thought of Renee.

  He watched the cloud dissipate. In order to function, he thought, in order not to come entirely undone, you need to have faith that the Earth will not stop spinning. That the sun will not quit. That gravity will hold you down. You stake your existence on their working. You rely on those around you to believe that the cash you hold in your hand is worth more than just the paper. You become used to running water, and electricity, you base your existence on the premise that there will be air to breathe, night to sleep by, and water to drink.

  He felt he understood how civilizations of the past might have believed they’d angered their gods when a system failed that was beyond their understanding. You cannot remove the foundation from a house and expect the house to stand. How far away were they from sacrificing their own virgins? Certainly, he thought, we’re all asking the gods: Why? Why this, why now, why us?

  Zach made a square with his fingers and looked through it, wishing he could cut the rooftop’s profile out of the cloud above him, so that a square slice of moist could nourish his plants.

  He made his way to the roof’s edge to take a look down the street, hoping like hell that he wouldn’t see a dead body down there.

  There was a man in the street on his back next to a station wagon with its driver’s-side door open. He was struggling to get up on two elbows and Zach could see he’d been shot. His clothes glistened darkly at the hip and there was a slickness to the street at his waist. At the back of the station wagon two water raiders quickly and precisely removed gallon after gallon of water from the back. So they’d caught a hoarder. Zach ran for the stairs.

  By the time he got there the raiders were gone. The man had a thick beard and he was in a state of shock. His eyes didn’t track well and he asked Zach several times about the location of a gas station. He was shot in the thigh. Zach couldn’t think what to do—he yelled out for his neighbors, for someone to contact an ambulance, but there was no response. The streets had gone scary calm.

  Zach helped pull the man to a one-legged stand and the man went limp in his arms in a noodly faint. Zach embraced him, holding him upright in a tight hug, his own clothes becoming doused with blood and his body shaking with the effort. He started to inch his way toward his front door until the man came to and then they weakly hop-hobbled into his house.

  He laid the bearded man out on the floor of the kitchen and took a pair of scissors to his pant leg. There was a hole on his upper thigh the size of a nickel, and an exit wound at the back of his leg. What the man needed, Zach thought, was a thorough cleaning of the wound, antiseptic, antibacterial, stitches, weeks of bed rest, and whatever else a hospital could offer. What Zach had was a bottle of hydrogen peroxide he was loath to use. Exposing hydrogen peroxide to air formed water and in turn would become drinkable.

  He settled on a battlefield medic cocktail of one unit of hydrogen peroxide, salt, honey and turmeric. Then he duct-taped a wad of clean dish towels tightly around the leg. Amid moans, the man fainted again, giving his head a solid whack on the kitchen floor tile.

  He wished Renee were there. There was a reassurance in her taking charge, a comfort in her command. You trusted her. But Renee wouldn’t have pulled the man in, a water hoarder, invited danger into her house like he had, would she? She drew limits, made rules, created policies. He didn’t know anymore.

  He had no way to get the man to the hospital, and no way to contact emergency services. He could go flag down a rare car or the police, he supposed, and he pondered the likelihood one might stop for him.

  Inside he fussed around the kitchen. The injured was laid out like an island on the floor. After a while he came to and groaned. When Zach leaned down to understand what the man said he clutched Zach’s shirt front with snake-like speed and whispered “thank you,” and then put his hands over his face and cried.

  His mother’s old bedroom was closest, and so he helped him there.

  “So?” Zach said.

  Zach fetched him a no-spill sip cup with two units of water and some pain killer. After the man had hungrily consumed both, Zach tried again: “What’s your story?”

  With a weak, halting voice, the man told him he’d driven here from Oklahoma.

  “To make some quick cash?” Zach guessed the station wagon could have carried a good eighty or so gallons of water. A small fortune on the right market.

  The man gave him a wary glance. “I grew up on my grandfather’s dustbowl stories. I sold a few gallons to get by, that’s it.”

  “To the wrong people, I take it. Now you know what the populace thinks of hoarders.”

  “I told you already. Not a hoarder.”

  “Well,” Zach said. “Everybody hoards a little, that’s basic, it’s human, but you can’t go round with that much in your car.”

  Zach took some glee in the analytical aspect of having a patient. He found a clipboard and sketched out a set of statistics to track the progress.

  Patient Name

  Time of arrival

  Minutes lying down

  Units of water consumed

  Grams of food taken

  Pain killers

  He had a quick bout of homesickness for the map room and Renee. There had to be other measures
he could use to track. Well-being? Words spoken? Or better: Verbosity. A subjective measure to track a subjective statistic. Answer range: Silent, reticent, inquisitive, chatty, verbose. It was a rough scale, and he knew that a “normal” wouldn’t be set until he’d gotten a feel for the average.

  He drew each of these statistics on a ten-day chart and began to fill out day one.

  “Name?” he said.

  The man groaned and opened his eyes and said, “More water.”

  “Yes, but what’s your name?”

  “Nombre.”

  Zach hovered over Clarity, readying to mark negative and somewhat surprised that they’d already spiraled into this. “I’m asking your name,” he tried again.

  “Nombre—means ‘name’ in Spanish—dad thought it was funny. Last name White.”

  Zach frowned at how it looked at the top of his patient statistics. Nombre White. Like first grade Spanish homework, he thought. It diminished the sex appeal of the chart significantly. He erased it, and wrote: “Mr. White, Water Hoarder.”

  He inspected his chart and saw that the patient had gone to sleep. A feeling of disappointment came and went. He wondered what was happening in the map room in Sherwood. On his chart, he made an extra column for sleep and marked the time with satisfaction. He hung the chart on the wall and it felt like adding a title on a painting, a still life. Wounded water hoarder, asleep on mother’s bed. It was a perfect moment.