Sherwood Nation: a novel

by Benjamin Parzybok

  We’s in yo head!, he wrote, and then sketched a satellite with a lightning bolt coming out of it and straight into a stick-figure’s head. He kept his ears out for Nevel.

  Sputnik is thirsty for more.

  The all-seeing eye.

  He penciled out a quick sketch of Renee, giving her braids and a tin-foil hat. He remembered the first time he’d seen her in the cafe, joking with somebody at the counter, a warm wit to her. She gestured her arms wide as she made a customer laugh. When his turn in line came, he’d been struck with her spell. He’d lingered there, deciding long over the scones, as she spoke about the qualities of each, how this scone, with the chocolate, was for sadness, for mornings when you wake up and there’s an unspeakable shadow right here—she tapped above her own heart—and this with the cranberries would be fire in the belly, like locomotive fuel, and this one with the apricot bits was for love, the finding and keeping of it.

  He bought the one for love, red-faced and smiling and she put it in its paper sheath and drew on a heart with a Sharpie. Let me know how it goes, she’d said conspiratorially, sly with smile.

  It had gone well, at least until now.

  He admired his drawing and then became conscious of the fact that he’d just sketched the fugitive and written her name below it. He gave her a Frida mustache and unibrow and drew satellites and buildings and other bits around her, embedding and obscuring her in the image.

  He didn’t know what this satellite company was even selling nor to whom, though with the power issues most other sources of communication had gone dark, so he could probably figure it out. At any rate, they gave him the brand to steer, not a product to pitch. He decided to take the chance, Russian roulette style, and hit the print button. He would either get caught or he wouldn’t. It was the designer’s printer, he could always intimate that the poster belonged to her. And if the poster showed up in the news and on the police blotter the next day, well then fuck. Maybe he’d follow her up north. He made himself count to thirty, during which time he drew a giant eye on his scratch pad, spying down on civilian hordes, then he walked briskly down the hall toward the printer. Halfway there Nevel exited the kitchen and Zach started.

  “Drought up,” Nevel said on his way by. Nevel’s office joke was that all anybody ever talked about anymore was the drought, so why not replace every word with that one?

  “Drought up,” Zach answered.

  He could feel his face and neck grow hot as he watched as the printer head painstakingly snail-danced across the paper, the poster’s tongue rooted in the cogs, so he could not make a run for it. From the back, his neck must surely look burned. But it printed, and it was lovely. He was, he thought as he admired it, a genius.

  A few minutes later in the copy room he punched in 300 color copies. No one would ask what he was doing, he repeated to himself, everyone else had something to hide. He was working, there was no need for his skin to blaze fire-engine red.

  “Hey, you’re everywhere today,” Nevel said.

  Zach felt the copy room couldn’t adequately hold two people. He knew his personal space requirements were on the high side, but still.

  “How many are you going to print here, tree-killer? Should I go on vacation? You printing your novel or something?” Nevel leaned against the wall, blocking the door, in a manner that suggested he might be there until nightfall.

  “No,” Zach said. “I’m not even writing a novel.”

  “Oh? I thought everyone was,” Nevel said. “What is it then, poster for your girlfriend?”

  The container known as the skull which held Zach’s brain expanded spontaneously a thousand feet in every direction, leaving his brain wet and small on the floor, amid a cavernous space, and it was there in that container that he wondered how in the hell Nevel knew what he was up to. He felt that in this new space where his brain sat in its own slippery goo, troops marched toward him, and his brain with all its power and inventiveness fought futilely to invent some utterly obvious reason why he would be copying a revolutionary poster for his fugitive girlfriend that would only prove to demonstrate his superior commitment to this very job. After a great long while, punctuated by the shuffling beat of the copier spitting out copy after copy, Zach said darkly: “It’s for work.” He couldn’t think of one single damn time that he’d ever been called on in his history of working at Patel & Grummus to make a photocopy.

  “Listen, man, I don’t care. Seems like there might be a few tender spots there. You want me to turn around while you do your special thing here or what? Look, I’m printing stuff for the communist party.” Nevel turned the piece of paper he’d brought into the copy room around to show Zach, and indeed it was a Soviet-era communist propaganda piece about mining.

  “Oh,” Zach said. “Is that for the TeleCelSys contract?”

  “What? No, it’s for my basement.”

  “Ah, should you be using the work copier for personal stuff?” he said, hating himself as he said it, wishing he were crushed under the boot of some great cockroach-crushing god.

  “I guess that seems like sort of a silly question, Zach.”

  “I didn’t really ask it. I didn’t really mean it. I mean I don’t even care. Will you make me a copy of your Russian thing too?” he said finally, to be companionable.

  Bea and Renee stood on the sprawling wood porch and thought about knocking. The door was a giant oak defense, but the front window was broken and the house reeked of urine and and the cloying, putrid smell of death. They could see into the living room.

  “Just a dog, probably,” Renee said, the crook of her arm covering her nose. “Dead dog.”

  “It’s abandoned,” Bea said, “right?”

  “Grab something.” Renee picked up a long shard of glass and gripped it in her hand.

  If there was someone there, they’d run, Renee thought. But she dreaded the thought of running more. She stared up at the height of the house and imagined it theirs. Fixed up and bustling with her people.

  Bea found a damaged wood chair that had been thrown from the porch into the bushes and broke a leg off. “Glass is a bad idea, sweetheart,” she said.

  “You’re the tough guy. I’m going to watch.” Renee knocked at the door, and after a minute’s silence yelled hello into the living room through the broken window.

  “OK,” Bea said, “here goes.” She straddled the window and crawled in, and then padded quietly around a listing living room table toward a door at the far side. As she came to the end of the table a man leapt out of a closet and tackled her, gripping her in a full body hug that took her over the top of the table and to the ground.

  Renee hurdled the window frame but by the time she was there Bea had the man in a cursing, spitting, snarling ball of a half nelson and wouldn’t let go.

  “Stop it,” Renee yelled at him, “is this your house?”

  “Yes!” He was bone-thin, wiry and brown-skinned and pungent. He flailed like a cat under Bea’s grip.

  “Is there anybody else here?” Renee said.

  “It’s not your house!”

  “No, we were—the window was out.”

  “Get the fuck off me!”

  “Not until you tell us if there’s others,” Bea said.

  “Thom! Erik!” he shouted.

  They listened quietly. Renee raised her glass shard and backed toward the window, staring at the ceiling.

  “You’re lying,” Bea said.

  “Get off me!”

  Renee appraised the man ensnared in Bea’s grip, their skin tones in stark contrast to one another. “Sorry,” she said. “We’re leaving now.”

  Bea released him from her grip and scrabbled quickly away. The man came to his feet, both hands filled with junk from the floor. A broken dish in one hand, a fistful of paper in the other. He was of an indeterminable age�
��a harshly wrinkled, hard-lived forty or an agile sixty-five.

  “We’re going now,” Renee said. She backed toward the window and climbed out. Bea followed.

  “Get out of here,” the man snarled, his voice sounding more deflated than angry.

  “We did knock,” Bea said.

  “What’s your name?” Renee said from the front porch.

  “Leroy. Leroy. I was here first.”

  “I’m Renee,” she said. “We’re leaving you in peace. You know of any empty houses, Leroy?”

  “Nope.”

  Renee touched Bea’s shoulder and nodded that they should head back to the street. As they left the yard, they heard a dish crash to the floor behind them. Leroy stood in the empty window.

  “You coming after us,” Bea said, raising her fists.

  “Wait,” Leroy said. He closed his eyes tight. “It’s a big house,” he said. He stepped backwards a few steps and brushed himself off with an agitated ferocity. “Never mind! Never mind!” he yelled.

  “We’re looking to find a house. We need a place to stay.”

  For a moment nothing was said. It was obvious that the unasked question was being weighed, and the moment to say you can’t stay here! came and went. She could feel the complications of the question, how against what neighborhoods they’d come through being alone might be more frightening than not. Renee came forward and leaned against the porch railing but it complained loudly and threatened to give so she stood again.

  “Careful!” Leroy said.

  “This is Maid Marian,” Bea said. “We need a headquarters.”

  “A what?” He inspected Renee from head to toe. “What do you do?” He eyed them suspiciously and then began shaking his head. “That kind of shit brings trouble.”

  “That’s not—” Bea said, and then, offended, began to reach for him again and he threw up his hands.

  “All right, I don’t care what you do! Let me show you the empty rooms. But I have the third floor. Everything’s exactly as I like it. Don’t touch anything up there. Don’t even go up there.”

  Renee smiled and started to ask if he was sure, but changed her mind. It was far better to be bound to those you disliked than to the unknown, she thought. And it was scariest of all to be alone. After Bea and Leroy had ascended Renee closed her eyes where she stood. She could hear them squabbling in the rooms above, and heard how the squabbling came easily to Bea—a good sign. The thrusts and parries of light argument, of testing one another. She could sense who Leroy was, a scavenger, a survivor. They were like him now, too. Most of all, she wanted to sleep. To have a room and to sleep in it. She felt like she was home.

  Later, Renee strolled through the house, taking stock and picking off the easy targets in damage control. While still a splendor to behold, the house had been been ransacked often enough that the halls were filled with trash. Someone had written I am the motherfucking king of Egypt! on every available surface on the first floor with a black Sharpie.

  “Is this . . . did you write this?” Renee asked Leroy as he hurried through on his way somewhere.

  “I’m not the king of Egypt,” Leroy said matter-of-factly, putting emphasis on the word “king,” as if to leave open the possibility of another position of note for himself.

  She chose a room on the second floor at the back of the house. The room had been a child’s room at one time. The walls were a light turquoise and trimmed with flowers. A bookshelf contained a wide range of titles, from Richard Scarry to the Chronicles of Narnia and the Earthsea Trilogy, and in those books she could see the passage of time in the room, could feel how the girl had grown older there. The abandoned conclusion of that progression, whatever the girl’s fate, saddened her. One dejected stuffed rabbit lay on the floor in a corner. Out the window was a large backyard that at one time had been beautiful. Now brown earth stirred up into small plumes of dust in the breeze. A wood swing set sat forlornly to one side. She wanted to know where the family had gone and whispered a well-wishing for them, thinking of the girl.

  Bea pulled in a twin mattress from down the hall. “I don’t want to sleep alone,” Bea said.

  “It’s a lonely feeling,” Renee said, “moving in like this, to be on the run.”

  “We should plan escape routes first thing,” Bea said, and then sat down on the bed and put her face in her hands and cried.

  Renee was taken by surprise. She sat next to her and stroked her hair, trying to think of something to say. “I am so sorry. Let’s get a message to your parents.” She embraced her back.

  Renee heard Bea take a deep breath from behind her hands.

  “No no, I’m fine, I’m going to be fine. I wouldn’t change it,” she said. “I mean beside the drought, there’s nothing that I would change about this.” She wiped her eyes, took another deep breath and said, “Whew!”

  “Why don’t you take it easy for a bit? Sleep if you need to.”

  Bea shook her head, stood up and walked out of the room.

  “Bea?”

  “Escape routes!” she yelled from down the hall. “And I’m going to check on Leroy.”

  As if in answer, from upstairs, came the sound of energetic furniture moving.

  He found the letter tucked in his pillowcase a couple nights after she’d gone. His pillow had crinkled and rustled annoyingly, and he’d wrestled with it, punching it into shape as he slept fitfully, waking each time to rediscover sadly that he slept alone. By then, the paper was a bit worse for wear. In the center was drawn a nude woman, her hips thrust cockily to one side, her breasts nicely full. Around the drawing Renee’s sloppy handwriting traced the woman’s shape.

  Hey Boyfriend!

  Look here, right? Introducing ENREE 2.0. My papery clone, to keep you company. She’ll tell you the same bad jokes and perform—OK, nearly, but not exactly—the same sexual services, provided your imagination chips in substantially (—I’m sure you’ll have no problem there.)

  CARE AND FEEDING:

  At night: sleep with her pressed against your chest. Stroke her gently. Brush her hair with the tips of your fingers.

  During the day: fold and place in the shirt pocket over that hungry organ that pumps with hope. Alternately: in your front jeans pocket, next to that other organ that has its own sort of pump (vroom!).

  Requires: very little feeding or watering. Ironing: on occasion, with cool iron.

  See, she’s almost better than I am. I’m already a little jealous!

  Please don’t worry. I’ll be back soon enough. (She says for herself, as much as him.)

  yrs,

  -r

  The first definitive copycat was spotted on I-84. A truck identical to the one Maid Marian robbed was pulled over to the shoulder at a severe angle, its back doors spread open. By the time the news crew arrived, only a few bottles remained, which a crowd of scavengers quickly whittled down and distributed equally among them. The driver was nowhere to be found. Among the news anchors’ Maid Marian speculation, some wondered whether the driver himself wasn’t responsible for the act, blending anonymously into the onlookers.

  Most notably, crudely spray-painted in red along one side of the truck was written:

  M M

  The underline below the letters was shaped like an arrow, as might be seen in a quiver.

  After the news showed the latest episode with the still-frame of the truck’s side, the symbol bloomed across the city.

  Nevel found an M.M. traced in crayon on the sidewalk outside his house. He turned to look at his son Jason with one eyebrow raised. He called to his family and they stood around and wondered where it’d come from. He looked up and saw the same symbol drawn at intervals down the length of the block.

  “It’s Maid Marian,” Jason said. “She’s been here!” And then he turned and ran into the hous
e for his own crayons.

  Zack saw it first drawn on the backs of hands of women in line at water distribution, a few days after the copycat crimes began in earnest. Drawn on like tattoos, sometimes with a heart encircling the symbol. Their expressions bold and steely, and they appeared to be organized, together perhaps. Were they watching distribution for fairness, he wondered, or at ready to rob from it, or admirers in solidarity?