The police chief said there were three accomplices, water thieves on bicycles. “It means less for everyone else,” he said. There was a menacing way in which he said it: if you cross me again, citizens, no water for no one. He asked anyone with information to please contact the police. One hundred and ninety four gallons were lost, he said. That’s nearly two hundred people’s daily rations.
“They weren’t rations,” Renee said into the room.
“Water crime’s a felony,” Bea’s father said, absorbed in the newscast.
An image was shown of the truck, filled with unit gallons, and a large white question mark flashed over the top of it.
“Clearly, this was a robbery,” the newscaster said, “but who was robbed? We were there on a tip, and we assume now the tip was given to us by Maid Marian’s group. But where was the truck going with so many pre-filled water bottles? Flyers were found at the scene claiming that this is a private truck carrying water to the West Hills. Under the Portland Water Act this makes the truck itself illegal. The driver is missing and is considered a suspect, and in the meantime the city has seized it. Many questions remain. We’ll stay on top of it for you.”
“The city has seized it,” Renee said and looked around the room at Bea’s family. “Sure they have. Nice one.”
Bea’s dad got up and paced to the window and looked out. Renee thought she heard him say fugitive. She’d known him for several years as an amiable fellow who never said much of anything in conversation, but now he seemed a little frightening, and she wondered if he’d turn her in.
“Well, I think you look very heroic,” Bea’s mother said. Her voice trembled. “What are you going to do?”
“I have no idea.” Renee leaned her head back on the couch and closed her eyes. She was exhausted and hurt, and yet there was something in the air. She could feel how her image was being broadcast over the city.
Zach watched the nightly news with amazement and horror as his girlfriend’s image was played over and over.
After the blackout came he curled up on his couch and stared at the deadened TV and felt sick to his stomach. He wondered if she was already in custody by now. He went to the roof and listened to the night. There were sirens and the sound of people in the street. The night was hot and humid and the stars felt predatory, a billion interested eyes, recording. She was out there somewhere.
At three in the morning she climbed into his bed and spooned against him.
He scrambled up. “How did you get in?” and then after he’d wakened a little more: “I saw what happened.” He clutched her forearm. “I hoped you’d show up.”
She told him they’d gone to Bea’s parents and had to run out the back. “We left the car. Look what I’ve got Bea into.” She pushed him back onto his side on the bed and pressed her face against his back. After a while he could feel that she was crying. “I won’t get you involved.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry. Are you hurt? Have you heard from any of the others?”
“No one. Bea’s asleep on your couch. I fucked up with Bea’s parents.”
Zach turned them both so that he could get a grip on her.
“What am I going to do?” she said.
“You could stay here.”
“And do what? Stay in your house and like be your house servant?”
Yes, he thought to himself, imagining the time they’d get to spend together, but dared not say it. Seattle or to the south were other possibilities, but there were rumors of regular carjackings in the rural stretches of the highway, and the occasional blockade. He didn’t want her to leave. If the media played her image on an infinite loop it would get picked up on other stations across the country as the requisite “drought imagery of the day,” and then nowhere was safe.
“Northeast Portland is spinning out of control,” he said. “They’ll either put it under martial law, or let it fall into a lawless slum. I’m betting the latter. There aren’t enough police to patrol there and the rich areas too. You could hide in that mess. It’s not safe, but it might be safe from the police.”
She was quiet for a long time and he listened to her breathe. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen her scared before, but he could hear it now in her breath as a new and wholly different future opened before her. Or, he wondered, was he mistaking this quiet for fear, when instead it was a buzzing thrill, an adrenalin drunk for what she’d done.
“Are you hurt?” he asked again. He lit a candle. “Let’s take a look at you.”
This he could do something about, and he took pleasure in taking care of her. He carefully unwrapped her head bandage. She had a scrape on her forehead that needed cleaning and a deeper injury at her hair linethat probably needed stitches, though it was too late to do a lot with it. She had bruises on her ribs and legs, her yellow-brown skin turning the bruises a livid purple. In the candlelight her eyes flickered intensely as she watched him. He went rummaging through medicine cabinets and came up with a field cocktail of medical supplies, turmeric and super glue and began reworking the dressing.
“I want you to know, this hurts me more than it does you.”
“Pfff,” she said.
He took hold of her ear. “This, hmm, yes. I’m afraid we’ll need to amputate.”
“Come on,” she said.
He cleaned her head wound, sprinkled in some turmeric and then, holding the wound closed, dabbed a thick seal of superglue over the top of it.
“Weird,” she said. “If I find out the turmeric is a joke . . .”
“I swear, it’s not.”
“What other spices are you going to use? I’m like some kind of pizza now?”
“Curry.” He noticed that she took a breath in the middle of sentences. “You having trouble breathing?”
“A little.”
He felt along her ribs, conscious of her nakedness in the candlelight. “I don’t know a lot about ribs, but it feels OK. I’m guessing you’ve got a crack, maybe a bruise.”
“Just a bruise then.”
“Correct.”
“So you’re saying I should stop my whining?”
“Pretty much.”
Back in bed they lay on their backs and stared at the ceiling.
“I don’t want you to be a fugitive,” he said. “I want us to, you know, go out.”
“I’m not sexier as a fugitive? With a head wound?”
“I don’t think you’re taking this seriously enough,” Zach said.
“I need you to roll over and hug me because my ribs hurt too much to move. But softly, OK? I don’t know what else to do. I’m just going to make jokes about it, because otherwise I’ll think about it, and then I’ll be terrified.”
“OK,” he said. “A little bit sexier.”
After some time, she said, “I’ll go to the Northeast—that’s probably where the others went. If that doesn’t work, I’ll come back here. I’ll be your housegirl.”
“Mm,” he said, and allowed himself to quietly ponder it for a moment. “You need some kind of a hobby to keep you from getting into trouble. Idle hands are the devil’s et cetera. Promise to lay low?”
Renee didn’t answer, and he could sense she was elsewhere, already on the journey across the city perhaps, or stuck in the infinite media loop of the truck robbery, or maybe seriously playing out a prospective stay at his house: how they might sit and have dinner-rations together in the evening, every evening, how she could be his for a while. He inhaled in her black hair and heard the deepening sighs of her sleep.
It was morning and the power was not yet on. Zach and Renee lay in the heat of the bed listening to the city wake outside the building’s windows.
“Benjamin Parzybok has reached into the post-collapse era for a story vital to our here and now. Sherwood Nation is part political thriller, part social fable, and part manifesto, its every page brimming with gonzo exuberance.”—Jedediah Berry (The Manual of Detection)
“Parzybok does this thing where you think, ‘this is f
un!’ and then you are charmed, saddened, and finally changed by what you have read. It’s like jujitsu storytelling.”
—Maureen F. McHugh (After the Apocalypse)
“As the corner of the country with the youngest cities, the Pacific Northwest is still very much in the process of being invented, and Benjamin Parzybok is one of our most imaginative literary inventors. In Sherwood Nation he gives us a vision of Portland’s rebellious indie spirit that goes deeper than the usual caricatures, revealing a city alive with conflict and possibility. This is playful, serious, and profoundly humanizing art.”
—Ryan Boudinot (Blueprints of the Afterlife)
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Since 2001, Small Beer Press, an independent publishing house, has published satisfying and surreal novels and short story collections by award-winning writers and exciting talents whose names you may never have heard, but whose work you’ll never be able to forget.
If you liked Couch how about Benjamin Rosenbaum’s collection of “plausible fabulisms” The Ant King and Other Stories:
“Rosenbaum proves he’s capable of sustained fantasy with “Biographical Notes,” a steampunkish alternate history of aerial piracy, and “A Siege of Cranes,” a fantasy about a battle between a human insurgent and the White Witch that carries decidedly modern undercurrents…. Perhaps none of the tales is odder than “Orphans,” in which girl-meets-elephant, girl-loses-elephant.”—Kirkus Reviews
Looking for the a great debut novel? Try Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria:
Crawford Award winner · Nebula and Locus award finalist
“It’s the rare first novel with no unnecessary parts – and, in terms of its elegant language, its sharp insights into believable characters, and its almost revelatory focus on the value and meaning of language and story, it’s the most impressive and intelligent first novel I expect to see this year, or perhaps for a while longer.”—Locus
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