Sherwood Nation: a novel

by Benjamin Parzybok

  Afterwards—or rather, after she’d given up—she sat at her desk to go through the affairs in this, week four of year one in the country of Sherwood. She filtered through the mound of correspondence from all quarters: there were notices from the city and the daily press release, there were notices to write and notes distilled from the map room, there were inquiries from other impromptu organizations up and down the coast, some formalized but most asking for advice or writing in admiration or hoping for alliances or even stewardship. She did not want to grow, not yet anyway.

  Their census had tallied 39,647 citizens in Sherwood territory, down from the last official census’s claim of 58,785. Some twenty thousand people had moved or died since the drought took hold.

  The territory lines at the eastern reaches were in flux, and she was trying to put an end to that. She’d sent out teams to clearly demarcate the land with a six-foot-wide swath of mud-green paint, a mottled ugly color, the combined mixture of thousands of donated cans of paint from the territory. They painted it on with push brooms. If your house was in the territory, on this side of that snot-green stain in the road, you were in her protection; if you were outside of it, you were the city’s problem.

  The territory was beginning to hum into its morning action. Outside her window down in the big grass field there was, in addition to the soldiers, a ration cooking class for all citizens over the age of fourteen, held daily for fifty people at a time. Next to it, the mandatory gardening class. All families were asked to keep a garden with low-water crops. Out front, she knew, volunteer forces gathered to work on various projects: trash services, community farms, school, and childcare. There were beautification projects, new classes to be given, and construction projects to complete. And at the center of it all: her. Queen of the year one.

  Zach and Renee sat on the back porch in the dark and watched the Sherwood volunteers unwind after a day’s work. A great bonfire burned out in the open, under the stars. It’s strange, Renee idly thought, that the wood of empty houses and dead trees might bring such warmth as they turn to ash. That a dead thing might seem so alive. She shivered and scooted closer in to Zach. For a moment firelight reflected off his teeth as he smiled.

  “Thanks,” she told him, and then wasn’t sure how to piece together the rest of the clauses that might attach to that. Thanks for coming up, thanks for your work, thanks for your ideas. She had told him she didn’t want to be seen together as a couple, so as to maintain the image of Maid Marian that the public knew. And because of this there was a bundle of guilt that propelled the thanks out of her. Thanks for sticking with me, even though I can be difficult. Even though I aim to keep you a secret, it is not because you’re not appreciated. She leaned her head against his shoulder.

  He waited to see if she was going to say more and when she did not, he said sure.

  A couple of Rangers passed out the door behind them, but this far from the ring of fire Zach and Renee were cloaked in darkness and were not seen.

  As for Zach: just then, with the crackling of firelight beyond, and the sparks spiraling a wild dance toward the stars, so that as they rose one twinkling light was lost in the other, just then he thought he loved her. He held her hand and let her head rest on his shoulder and he was genuinely happy. For a moment he pondered this, but at a distance, worried that any study of his happiness might succumb to its analytical observation. But there it was, this happiness that arrived at last in a new trembling nation born from the worst of times.

  He had spent some weeks there now, building the systems in the map room and enjoying these few quiet, secret moments. Hating her sometimes, too, yes. There were endless slippery facets to her. Despite his job as the director of information, he felt there was a subcurrent that he couldn’t quite grasp. It was the same with her personality. The longer he knew her, the less certain he felt of what he did know. If he could save this instant, freeze them both here staring toward the bonfire, a simple moment, he would.

  “Chilly?” he said.

  “A little.” She scooted into his embrace.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  She laughed. “Frogs.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  The image of his building across town came to him then, with its little projects and familiarity, with its promise of solitary pursuits, and like a little ping of sonar a tiny homesickness sounded in him. Here he slept behind the couch in the map room and lived among swarms of people, and shared his girlfriend with the world. He gripped her hand more tightly and she reciprocated. He didn’t want to think about this. It was as he’d feared, his happiness diminished with focus.

  “They must have been the first to go.”

  “Frogs? Were there even frogs here?” he asked.

  “Well, everywhere, I mean.”

  “Don’t think about that.”

  “All right,” she said. And then after a while: “Are you doing all right?” She stroked his leg.

  “Yeah. I’m good,” he said, but her query focused the lens further and he felt the sonar ping grow strong until it was a bugle-horn of sadness in him, like a hunter lost deep in the woods calling toward a distant home. He cleared his throat and palmed her knee. “Yes,” he said. “Frogs. They would have lasted a little while, right? Just moved in closer to their waning ponds? Rain-dependent plants were first, I bet. But they have seeds. The seeds could grow back.

  “You don’t want to talk about it?”

  “Let’s just sit here.”

  There was a commotion at the fire as a round of cheers broke out. Another log was put on and a storm of sparks whorled skyward.

  She leaned toward his ear and he moved in to hear what she wanted to whisper.

  “Ribbet,” she breathed. He laughed.

  “I want you to be happy here,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said, “thank you.” He kissed her. Afterward he wished for the sound of a single frog in the distance, at a puddle’s edge somewhere, croaking hopefully into the night.

  The bullet was removed from Martin’s skull.

  “A terrible shot,” the new surgeon observed jovially. “But if it’d been that much over?” The surgeon held up his fingers to show how close he’d been, and Martin observed a thin centimeter between the gloved finger and thumb with his remaining eye. “Hoowee, I’m sure you don’t mind my telling you I was sweating bullets working it out. But here you are!” He patted Martin firmly on the shoulder.

  He’d lived with it long enough to have a certain meditative relationship with it; waiting in the hospital queue, waiting for an AWOL doctor to show, building his strength again in a hospital bed. And now with the pocket memory of it, the niche it’d hollowed out of him, and the canvas patch that covered its entrance, he felt like they’d pulled a metallic seed of hate from him, the thing that turned him like a compass needle toward Sherwood, with the crushing mallets of his hands wound up for pinwheeling.

  Now he stood swaying. Outside the hospital trying to decide where he would go.

  It turned out there was enough hate left over without the bullet there to guide him still. He walked slowly in the direction of Sherwood in his hospital-supplied clothes. Dug up from the morgue, he suspected but did not ask. His gait was slow and unsteady, pain a dull bloom in his eye. He kept his right hand half raised to protect his blind side—a lesson learned from having rammed into objects in the hospital whose proximity had befuddled him.

  He’d heard incessant rumors of Sherwood’s progress. The patients talked of its clinics, how life must be tolerable there. The very surgeon who failed to show up to operate on him had disappeared, they believed, to a better life inside its borders. His fellow patients in the cesspool-hospital, even the nurses, had spoken of Maid Marian until his eye socket burned with lava rage.

  It was not far. Two blocks north, five blocks e
ast to the outer edge. At the corner across from the border there was a burned-out gas station, and he squatted in the wreckage to allow himself a moment of rest. The streets were quiet. His one eye spotted the roving of people down the length of the border, but not vehicles. The image of his hands around her neck played with a lusty pornography in his mind, and after each vision he found his breath ragged and his face hot with sweat.

  Martin walked up Fremont, his right hand raised in front, his left hand out to the side trailing along the wall, as if to sense for her presence in the border debris: cars and furniture and detritus, all painted an olive green and blocking entirely one lane. Guardhouses demarcated every block or two, manned by young acolytes.

  The inside of his mouth tasted like the leather of old books and the thirst craving was deep. He stopped at a guard station. Inside was a big-boned, brown-haired woman with a flattened nose. She looked at him distrustfully as he leaned into the tiny guardhouse’s window.

  “Can you help a one-eyed fellow out with a drink,” he said huskily.

  “No, I’m sorry,” she said and scribbled something on a small stack of papers in front of her.

  “I’m dying here. Sherwood supposed to be all good people, right?”

  “You have a Sherwood ID?”

  “I used to live here.”

  “Migration is back up that way.” She hooked her thumb. “See about getting in with them. I don’t do that.”

  Martin shrugged and hobbled further along. The old dress shoes the hospital gave him were uncomfortable, and he could feel the heat spots of future blisters.

  A mile or so up Fremont there was an official crossing. Several police officers and a few more Sherwood guards stood on opposite sides of an opening in the barrier, and a dozen or so people milled around performing the shady under-dealings that border leeches perform the world over. He looked for someone he knew. A man with a beard down to his chest and no shirt offered him something in a whispered garble of syllables and Martin elbowed past him. Even the drugs were unfamiliar to him now. How could so much change in so little time?

  A car roared toward them and came to a screeching halt in front of the border. During the conflict, a passel of border-junkies faded quickly toward the crossing and Martin joined them, pushing across the threshold nonchalantly. Once through, they burst apart like dandelion seed, separating into the citizenry of Sherwood as best as they were able. The illegal border crossing was noticed and an alarm was sounded. Rangers began to spill in from side streets to round them up. Rather than run in his blister-inducing shoes, Martin sat down heavily on the curb of the busy block and took off one shoe for inspection. The pursuing guards ran right past him.

  Martin smiled into the leather of his shoe. Too smart for management, he thought. After they’d passed, he limped up the sidewalk to the house he’d sat in front of, and barreled through the front door.

  What a shitty father he was. If they could get through this without Jason having a permanently bent arm, he thought, grown into some strange hook or backward-facing appendage, he’d close the tunnel, live right, get a new job, pay attention to his family.

  After he’d parked at the hospital, he picked the boy up in his arms and Jason groaned and passed out. The arm slipped out of his hands and flopped backwards, hanging down, at a new joint above the elbow. “Shit shit shit,” Nevel said. He used his knee as a table to hold him and grabbed the errant arm before setting out.

  On the other hand, he thought, maybe he would take his tunnel deep into Sherwood. He could run an underground railroad—literally underground—transporting injured children to Sherwood’s clinics.

  Thirty or so people stood in front of the entrance, in a queue. They were quiet, shuffling from foot to foot. At his feet the pavement was stained and still slick with repeated paintings of blood, the trail of it actively reapplied through the day as patient after patient added their own Pollock contributions. There were too many emergencies to treat, and far too few working hospitals. A nurse came every few minutes to catalogue the newly arrived, whisking, when she could, any life-or-death cases to the front.

  When it had first become clear that the city—the entire west—was in for a hard haul, hordes had left. They migrated east or overseas. The wealthiest, and especially those whose skills were valuable everywhere—doctors, dentists, nurses—had to consider the well-being of their families over that of the city. Who could blame them, Nevel thought. And why hadn’t he gone? When he still could—before the east had closed its doors to most immigration. They could go nowhere but here now. Just stay where you are, the world told them, hunker down, do not move or squirm, consume nothing. Someday it will be over.

  Several places in front of them a man passed out and fell, a hard and solid sound. The line continued its glacial pace around him, their guilty, self-pitying eyes making awkward glances until paramedics came for him. Nevel noted the way in which they carried him, exhausted and callous.

  Inside the crowded waiting room he spoke with a kindly nurse. She put her hand on Jason’s head and said “poor thing” and then he found a seat on the floor and waited, with Jason still in his arms, until his muscles burned from the effort. Jason woke and cried until he’d cried himself out and still they waited. They talked about the tunnel and giant robots in hushed tones and tried not to speak about broken arms.

  Nevel told him every single detail he could remember from the first three Star Wars movies. The fellow patients around leaned in close, with their own broken bones or bleeding wounds or cancers, adding a missed line or detail here or there, until it became a collective retelling, with side commentary and trivia and the occasional sound effect by a wild-looking, bushy-bearded gentleman with a makeshift bandage across his neck.

  Jason was transported by it. He held the broken arm across his lap like a dead eel and did not move except to ask for clarification, “What do the sand people eat?”, “Which is faster, an X-Wing or a TIE fighter?”, “What if you have to go to the bathroom and you’re in a battle?”, “Did Luke ever get a broken arm?”, “Is Maid Marian like Princess Leia?”

  The last question caused laughter and interested debate in the patients around him. Nevel paused in his telling as he thought again of the mayor’s gift. He had slipped some into their own rations. He topped off bottles at night, taking advantage of his wife’s absent-mindedness to make their life a little easier. But now, as he framed it in the black and white universe of Star Wars, he realized his son would interpret his actions as belonging to the dark side. Right? Remembering his attempt to use the clinic in Sherwood earlier, he gritted his teeth in anger again. His boy had a glazed-over expression now, in his lap unable to sleep. He whimpered from the pain and held very still.

  Deep in the night they moved on to the prequels until a little before dawn they were called in. As the doctor set Jason’s arm the boy screamed. By ten in the morning they left with a plaster cast and a weak chorus of “may the force be with you” and headed home.

  Cora met them on the porch. The night had been hard on her. She embraced Jason and steered him into the house and Nevel knew they would argue later. He sat down on the first step and looked across at the border, busy as always. He was exhausted. Nevertheless, he’d taken care of things. It may have been his fault, but he’d taken responsibility, and there was some satisfaction and relief there.

  When the children were asleep he grabbed hold of Cora’s arm. He would show her his water stash and tell her the truth. He would free himself of guilt.

  He led her into the tunnel, his flashlight’s beam absorbed in the dirty brown of the walls. Finally he came to a small grotto, against one wall of which he’d leaned a number of flattened cardboard boxes.

  “Nevel,” she said. In her voice there was a tinge of fear. She didn’t like being in this far.

  “No, come on,” he said. He pulled away the cardboard boxes, revealing a
four-foot hole behind. “In we go,” he said. He crouched down and stepped in, taking the light with him.

  “Nevel, please.”

  She was in the dark on the far side of the hole now. He skimmed over the tops of the bounty in his cave and the light reflected marvelously along the walls, warped and brilliant through the glass. He gave the bottles a tap with his shoe so that the light danced. “Cora,” he said. He leaned down and went halfway back through the small tunnel and put his hand out. “Come now, it’ll be OK.”

  She took his hand and followed behind. When she saw the bottles she stopped, her mouth agape, and he watched the light play over her face now. He couldn’t remember being more in love with her.

  Mayor Brandon Bartlett stood at his balcony window and watched the commander of the National Guard drive away. His vehicle, a black armored SUV, was accompanied by an armada of similar vehicles which traveled everywhere with him, so that when you saw him he seemed to be part of an angry swarm of metal, all protecting him. The whole lot of them continued on below his balcony, and the mayor raised his middle finger to send them off properly.

  The mayor hated himself just then, as the last of the SUVs rounded the corner and Roger retreated toward their airport base.