Sherwood Nation

by Parzybok, Benjamin;

  A bearded man on a bicycle with a tattoo of a pigeon on his neck was interviewed. Three other bicyclists, two men and a woman, were in the background behind him. They were going to find her before the police, he said.

  The interviewer said: “But—I’m trying to understand, what will you do when you find her?”

  “We’ll hide her. She’s a truth-exposer.” The bearded man turned to the camera and pointed. “You can’t trust the city!”

  Behind him, the woman cyclist called out, “We’ll join up with her!”

  “Well,” the newswoman said into the camera, “as you can see, Maid Marian has stirred up a tremendous amount of emotion among Portlanders.”

  Next they interviewed the sheriff, and Zach watched with amazement as his girlfriend transformed into a brand. First, there was the iconic image, a woman distributing water to the thirsty. Next they affixed legendary connotations to the image—Maid Marian of Robin Hood—giving the “thief” an irreproachable sense of morality and ethics. The news qualified this tongue-in-cheek, saying the word thief as if they should all be lucky to know such thieves. Then a fan base sprung up—good god, not more than a day or two later—deepening the brand and making it socially acceptable—nay, desired. They wanted her to win, they began to need her as a conduit for their hope. People were actually putting signs on their houses to indicate their fealty to brand. It was an advertiser’s dream. He watched as the police obliviously made her image stronger. At this point, if she were caught the city would riot. They’d already rioted once this week, he remembered, after a horribly orchestrated water distribution fell into chaos and a nine-year-old boy was trampled.

  A symbol had been created for her, and it was stenciled on the street. Her name and likeness surely would already be scribbled on bathroom stalls, bus stop shelters, cop cars. If teenagers bent their energy to her, if she became part of the culture’s consciousness—then she would have ascended beyond what was possible as a commercial brand. Then she would belong to the realm of Che Guevara or Joan of Arc or, he realized, Robin Hood. It was too early to tell, but no matter the situation, he knew it couldn’t be helping his relationship.

  Before dusk, Renee and Bea rode for the unused water towers. Now that they’d been in the neighborhood, the mile and a half ride felt like a long, hazardous journey, and they embarked with trepidation. They rode hard, pausing for no one and memorizing their route and the obstacles in it, complete with its burnt-out cars and trash heaps, the charred remains of houses, roving bands of wary youth. Renee sensed that each block had its own impromptu system of arrangements and connections, of safeguarding each other, or in some cases a single group that antagonized all others.

  At Nineteenth and Prescott they pulled over to the edge of the street to inspect the park. Two water towers rose in front of them. At their feet there was a playground. One water tower was shaped like a massive thimble, the other like some old Russian moon rocket, suspended on eight legs. They were empty now, monuments from a different time.

  The park was tiny and crowded with objects. In its half-dozen city lots were stuffed the two towers, a playground, and a couple of maintenance buildings, but there were still plenty of places to hide, and so they wheeled their cycles in carefully. Bea gripped the kitchen knife she’d strapped to her handlebars. But the park was quiet. They sat underneath the big thimble tower and chatted in a whisper while they waited for sufficient darkness.

  Renee unwrapped the green laser pointer from its Morse code instructions, and it made her smile. Renee had studied the Morse code off and on all day in anticipation of this moment, reading his handwriting and trying to commit what she could to memory. Bea would help her write down and translate the bits, but she had much to say and much she wanted to hear.

  She tried to imagine him out there, climbing the stairs of his funny old building, opening the metal door that led to the roof where he worked on projects or watched the street below. Sitting cross-legged on the black tar and rubbing his hand across his clipped head.

  The light was dim enough to begin, and she hoped he was there. If only it were possible to compress the space between, so that she could whisper into his ear with her eyes closed, her nose brushing against his cheek.

  This would have to do. They stationed themselves on top of the plastic playground slide and faced toward the big thimble tower. She opened up the beam of the laser pointer and traced a circle up high on the tower in intervals, a hard, bright green dot the size of her thumb tip. She felt spooked by the alert they were broadcasting, but to hear from him was worth the risk.

  She traced circles a few more times. If there was no answer, she would tap out the message she’d memorized for his video camera.

  She patted Bea’s leg in the anxious anticipation of anything happening, grateful she’d come.

  A new dot appeared on the tower, this one the size of a fist, the beam gone wide from the distance. It was him. It flashed a series of rapid blips—it was easy to read excitement in the reply.

  The messages came fast. Bea read them off the tower to Renee, who scratched them out on paper and tried to decode them as they came in.

  “Dash dot dot dot space dot space dot dash new word,” Bea said.

  “Hey, that’s your name. He wants to know if you’re here, Bea.” Renee answered back a yes: -.—. ...

  His light shone on the tower to reply and she left hers there, circled around his. Their lights flirted around the edges of each other. This was silliness, she knew it, and dangerous too. Morse code was a kludgy, awkward way to tell someone how you felt. But for a moment, she couldn’t bring herself to remove her beam from this approximation of him.

  “What’s going on?” Bea said, and then after a moment she sighed with disgust. “Never mind.”

  Zach’s light began to relay messages again. He had found Josh, whom he was sending up, but no others. She told him what she could of their house, but tapping out the messages was painstakingly slow, and she began to grow more nervous as the night went black.

  “We better go,” Bea said.

  Renee nodded. At the other end of that green dot was Zach. She sat for a while longer. They didn’t have anything else to say, not really. After a while Renee tapped out: “love bye.”

  As they were leaving they watched one last quick reply, the bright green dot pulsing out its last message on the tower. “2MROW?”

  -.—. ...

  In the morning they were in the living room removing glass debris when an older woman stopped in the street outside the house.

  After a while she leaned against the front gate heavily, as if preparing for a long wait. She stared in blankly, something about her movements at the end of things. She reached her dark brown hands through the gate’s slats and was still.

  They watched her from the living room window, wary.

  “She doesn’t look armed,” Bea said. “I wish she’d move along.”

  “She’s waiting for someone,” Renee said.

  “Leroy!” Bea called. “You got a visitor!”

  “Not for me!” Leroy yelled from the third floor.

  Renee picked another handful of tiny shards of glass from the carpet, painstaking work. After about ten minutes she looked up to find the woman still there.

  “You want me to go talk to her?” Bea said to Renee.

  “No, let her be.”

  Forty minutes later Renee found her sitting on the front porch, her hands folded across a gold and pink polyester dress, trembling slightly. She was in her early seventies and her black hair was smoothed to a plasticky perfection. A wig, Renee surmised.

  “Oh,” the woman said, when she saw she’d been spotted.

  “Can I help you?” Renee said

  “Are you Maid Marian?” the woman said, and then waved her hand dismissively and clumsily stood. “Never mind,” she said.

  Renee swallowed an instant of confusion. “That’s what they call me.”

  “I heard you were up here.” The woman stopped and stared t
oward the gate. “I don’t even know what I’m doing here.”

  “Heard it from who?”

  “Everybody.”

  “Everybody?”

  “Well not everybody,” the woman said, as if Renee had made some outrageous claim. “Just people talking.”

  “What’d they say,” Renee said.

  “Nothing,” the woman said crossly. “We all saw you on TV, what’s there to say?”

  “I see,” Renee said, but wasn’t sure she did. “And you’re looking for—do you have a place to stay, sleep?”

  “Well, yeah,” the woman said angrily and took one step toward the gate.

  Renee felt like she’d crossed some line of propriety and looked for a way to apologize.

  After a while the woman said: “No, I don’t.”

  “OK,” Renee said. They sat there for a while in silence. There was a touch of sea air in the morning breeze, and yet despite the tease, no rain came. The weather had snaked its way up the channel the Columbia river had made and sat there in the city with its arms crossed, as if to say, What are you going to do about it?

  “You can stay here,” Renee said. It came naturally. She made the decision without consulting Leroy or Bea. “It’s a huge house. There’s work to do. What’s your name?”

  “Julia,” the woman said, and fought a smile.

  Renee instinctively sensed an exchange was in order, that for Julia to stay here without a contribution would lead to an unfortunate debt in Julia’s mind. She hunted around for a trade, no matter how small.

  “Are you a good judge of people?”

  The woman reared back and inspected her. She gave Renee a bird-eyed stare. “Kind of question is that? Everybody thinks they’re a good judge of people.”

  Good answer to a dumb question, thought Renee.

  As they walked into the house they heard Leroy yell, “Third floor is off limits!”

  Julia paused and leaned heavily on the banister. She was a little out of breath and Renee thought she might not be well. “That Leroy?” she yelled up the stairs, but no answer came.

  “You know him?” Renee said.

  Julia shrugged. “Everybody knows Leroy.”

  Renee gave her a choice of rooms on the second floor, and let her know she might have to share eventually. “You get settled, then come back and we’ll talk about what needs doing.” Renee watched her pause in a room and inspect the things that had been left there—a torn mattress and dresser, a cracked mirror on the wall, a door that led to a shared bathroom with no running water. She appeared tired and Renee struggled against the urge to tell her to lie down.

  “I’ll bring you a drink,” Renee said, realizing she’d have to borrow it from Leroy. “We’ll all be safe here.”

  “OK,” Julia said, her voice turning suddenly meek and conciliatory.

  When Julia came back down they sat on the front porch and talked.

  Renee wanted to hear more about “people talking” but she couldn’t figure out how to get the subject up again. “Do you think others will come?” she asked finally. They stared at each other; a plastic bag blew by and somewhere a door slammed.

  “They’ll come.”

  “Because of . . . ?”

  “For Maid Marian.” Julia shrugged and appeared to be done talking. They sat in silence for a while. “These are pretty low times,” she said.

  Renee agreed.

  “People—they haven’t had something to come to. They need something to come to.”

  The Riot

  Next came a man named Chris, in his mid-forties, thin and busy. He wore a baseball cap and worked incessantly at some invisible thing in his mouth, a stone or chipped tooth or perhaps his cheek. He was quiet and Renee could see it was painful for him to look her in the eyes, his own blue eyes big and hurt and uncomfortable. Julia said she knew of him from her old neighborhood.

  “I’ve passed his block, seen him working in his yard,” Julia told Renee. “Always working, out there mowing. His yard was nice.”

  “What do you want?” Renee asked him.

  He shrugged. He’d seen her on the news, he said. He didn’t need a place to stay, he needed something to do. He’d been unemployed for three years and the restlessness was killing him. After that first day, he showed up at 8 a.m. every morning to work.

  “Here,” he said. He pushed a full unit gallon into her arms and two days of rations and then stared at the floor. “I don’t need it.”

  “Thank you,” Renee said. “But no, we can’t take that.”

  He raised his hands, refusing to take it back. “Please. I know you can’t get any. You keep giving yours away, ha ha,” he said, and then blushed. “I want you to have it.”

  She set him to work on the house, and he turned his nervous energy on it with fervor. He built an outhouse. He made bunk beds in preparation for more that might come, the wood pulled from the walls of abandoned houses. He cleaned out junk piles, fixed latches, sealed windows, whatever it was that needed doing. His projects spawned new projects, which spawned new projects, so that Renee would come in to find a lightbulb replacement task had resulted in part of the ceiling torn apart.

  “Don’t fix any leaks,” Renee said. It was her running joke. If the roof leaked, they could all go home.

  Then others came, drifting in off the street like leaves blown in. Some arrived fired up, kids in their twenties having found her, ranting about the Portland Water Act and distribution inequality and looking for ways to fight. Many truck robberies were proposed, and each time Renee pushed back. No, they were gathering. They were building. No need to flag themselves. They chipped their ration allotments into the communal meals and hung on. Some needed a place to stay—refugees in their own city—while others just came to take a look at her, she supposed. With each arrival she felt a greater need to live up to what they expected, but also a greater sense of who she was. Authority began to come more easily. Her visitors assumed she was in charge—and they seemed to need someone to be in charge. She placed each of them in some small routine, giving them a moment of purpose, allowing herself to believe they were all working toward something larger. As of yet she had only a vague idea of what that larger thing was.

  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.

&nbs
p; 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.