Sherwood Nation: a novel

by Benjamin Parzybok

  Upon closing the door to the house in which he’d hid, Martin jumped at the sight of the behemoth, lifelike painting of Jesus in the entry way, looking down on him with stern, agonized, compassionate eyes, blood seeping from his forehead crown.

  A short, older woman appeared directly in front of the painting, her head at Jesus’s neck height, so that in the dim light it briefly appeared as though the giant Jesus head had grown a diminutive, wizened body to carry it around.

  “Que?” the woman said with a volume and severity Martin had not thought possible in such a small person.

  Goddamnit, Martin thought, she’s just an old lady and standing in front of Jesus to boot. But there was nothing to be done. He stretched out his hands for her neck.

  But she moved like a jackrabbit. Before he could get his hands around her neck, she grabbed a baseball bat at the foot of the painting and swung it into his blind-side knee.

  “Jesus fucking Christ!” Martin hollered in pain and dropped to the floor. He gripped the damaged knee and she stood over him with the bat raised. “No no no, please,” Martin yelled. “Holy shit, lady! Yo soy buena gente, buena gente!”

  She left him then and he stayed where he was on the floor feeling sorry for himself. He was thirsty and damaged. For a moment, as he lay there, he had occasion to consider his current trajectory. A few deep thoughts shuffled through him as to the meaning of his own life. And then he decided that when that lady shitbird came back, this time he was going to wring her little old leathery neck, without fail.

  He wasn’t sure how long he lay on the floor of the dusty entranceway, breathing in the smell of old people house. The bloodied Jesus looked down on him, now with less compassion and more spite. A man of fifty-three, he thought. This is kid’s work. Lying on the floor with a busted knee.

  After a while she came back. In one hand she had a small glass of water, in the other she gripped the baseball bat. She offered him the glass.

  “Gracias,” he croaked. He gulped the water down and leaned his head back against the floor.

  Her name was Celestina Angela Romero. She was seventy-three years old, under five feet tall, and widowed. He sat on a flowery couch underneath another painting of Jesus on a cross, this one scantily clothed. Across a room cluttered with religious knickknacks Celestina sat in a chair and talked to him unceasingly in Spanish, a fraction of which he understood. He rested his hand on his swollen knee and prodded at it carefully. Nothing was broken, but she could deal a hell of a blow. In his mind he phrased and rephrased a way to ask for more water without angering her and then gave up, leaning his head against the couch. His tongue sat in his mouth like a dried cat turd. He got the feeling she didn’t get too many visitors. In fact, he supposed she’d harbor a rabid brown bear, if he’d only sit and hear her out.

  As dusk began to darken, the house the lights came on. Celestina got up and motioned for him to follow, which he did with great pain. Along the way she pointed out the house’s salient features in Spanish. One window featured a view of an outhouse in the backyard. They passed a kitchen he hungered to rip through for whatever rations remained. Halfway down a hall she stopped and motioned for him to enter a room. Inside was a tidy, spare bedroom with a twin-sized mattress. She gestured insistently. He was too tired to argue.

  “Gracias, Doña.” He nodded. He closed the door behind him, killed the lights and was asleep shortly after.

  In the morning, his knee was improved but he walked with a hobble. She fed him at the table like he was an errant son who’d returned after many years. He wolfed down several corn-sweet breads she worked up during the short power-on, and then she listed through the tasks that needed doing, and like that errant son, he obeyed. He patched up a broken window with cardboard and Elmer’s glue, dry-dusted everything over five feet high, including the tops of the Jesus paintings, hauled trash from the basement that had sat for some decades, and, in the remaining bits of daylight, re-affixed the ailing door to the outhouse. He didn’t know what the fuck he was doing.

  It was there on the inside of the outhouse door that he found side-by-side artistic renderings of the Mother Mary and Maid Marian. He sat over the shit hole, attempting the impossible, for he was no match against the vengeance his intestine wreaked on him, and spent a few moments inspecting them. The one with the halo, the other with her gritty rebel hue. The rendering made her pretty, he admitted. With her twin braids lying across each shoulder, her vague Hispanicness, dark eyes and large eyelashes. He longed to deface her image somehow without evoking the suspicions of Celestina. He drew his thumbnail across her neck so that a crease was made there. “On guard, puta.”

  She glared back at him, righteous, and he swore. Enough motherfucking dallying. It was a toxic oven in the outhouse. The weather had turned vicious hot. He finished the outhouse door with muscular irritation and then stomped back through the house, favoring his good leg. Celestina picked up his trail, clutching a handful of lightbulbs, doling out his next chores. But he had made up his mind. He grabbed the baseball bat from where it leaned under Jesus and walked into the dusk toward Sherwood headquarters. He was going to take care of this bullshit right now.

  She’d taken his home, shot him through the head, and killed his cousin Fred. He tested the bat and found he could wield it like a spry stick, the anger giving him strength.

  The air outside had the smell of an approaching dust storm. There was an electric nosebleed burn to the dryness, and static shocks bit his finger when he grazed his hand along a chain-link fence. Martin clasped the bat to his bad-knee leg so that in profile it would not be noticed and limped toward headquarters. There were many blocks to walk, and he began to grunt in pain with each step.

  Two blocks in, a fellow who stood in the middle of the street called out to him. A Ranger, he saw now, as he drifted closer. The man had called him “countryman” and had asked him to state his business.

  “Ahoy, countryman,” Martin said cheerfully as he approached, and then Martin socked him in the balls with his bat.

  The Ranger collapsed to the ground, wheezing an unintelligible retort. And then Martin saw him start futzing around with a light, and so Martin hit him again, somehow missing his head and hitting him on the shoulder.

  Martin stepped on the Ranger’s hand that held the light. Looking down the line of sight, he saw a far-off light reply and realized the alarm was sprung. Martin snatched the light and frantically blipped the button on the little gizmo back toward where the light was coming from, hoping he’d sent some kind of message back.

  “You little bastard, what am I going to do now?” Martin spotted the Ranger’s bike leaning against a stop sign. He tenderly threw his bad leg over the seat and then pedaled into dark. He returned the way he’d come, wary that at any moment Rangers might come pouring from the night like in some third-rate horror movie.

  Back at Celestina’s he stashed the bike behind the outhouse. Then he put the baseball bat back where Jesus could watch it. In the quiet, dark kitchen, he fumbled onto a small plate of food she’d left for him. It was still warm. He had done enough damage tonight, he thought, and chuckled to himself about the poor bastard he’d left in the street. He would be more careful next time. He pulled out his new Ranger light, a little LED thing, and scanned it over the food. Sweet breads and beans. He could kiss her. She was the most wonderful woman in the world.

  Zach felt a hollow fear bang around his insides and knew it was time for distribution. Every morning contained a growing thirst and an expectation of that fear. He missed Sherwood. He had been at his house too short of a time and had no savings. With the two of them, he and his patient, to look after now, he could not afford any mistakes.

  When the time came and his tongue felt coated in ash he tucked a knife—a small but easily opened blade—into his pocket and set off with his unit gallon. He watched his neighbors walk toward the same destination like wolv
es toward a kill, and he stayed close in with them, familiars by sight. Most of them were in groups, and he knew that those who walked alone were not to be trusted. In times like these, people who have the disposition band together and watch each other’s backs.

  The day was burdensomely hot and the heat pressed on him, made each footfall toward his destination feel like a herculean extra effort. There was no cloud in the sky, just a mammoth bowl of blue sky that crushed down on them. As the temperature had increased over the last week, his skin had dried up, so that the subtlest of facial expressions caused his lips to crack and bleed.

  Distribution was at Oregon Park, a few blocks from his place. The truck was already there, white and bulbous, like an egg waiting to be cracked, darkened by dust and the grease of human hands that reached up to touch its cool belly. He stood in a line that wound its way along the dusty park, its once great trees all cut down in the winter previous. There were patterns rutted deep into the ground for this daily ritual they all performed. The standing in line, the truck parked in the same spot, the National Guardsmen roving their eyes back and forth across the lot of them.

  After a long wait Zach made it to the front. There were some moments of confusion as the guard checked his identification with its water code and noticed that he’d had his card registered in Sherwood recently. Zach responded quietly that he’d moved out of Sherwood, as he’d explained many times already, and he could feel those behind him lean in to listen. When he was cleared he hooked the nozzle into the top socket of his unit gallon and heard the relieving sound of it being filled. But as it came to the top the nozzle sputtered and the tone changed. Behind him someone yelled and he quickly disconnected his gallon. The truck was out of water and there were at least a hundred more in line behind him. The murmur of the news made it quickly up and down the line, and the ragged-looking man directly behind him called out in protest.

  “That’s enough,” the Guardsman said and held his hand up to calm the crowd behind him.

  Zach gripped his bottle to him and eased away from the line as the crowd began to go amorphous, transforming from order to mob. “There’ll be another truck,” the Guardsman yelled out.

  “I stood here an hour! An hour!” the man who had been behind him said.

  “It will come,” the guardsman said.

  “Hey, Sherwooder!” he yelled as Zach retreated. He followed after Zach and then reached in for a hold on Zach’s bottle and for a moment they wrestled it like a football on astroturf, pulling and scratching at each other. The man’s furry, tangled mat of hair was sticky from grime. They fell together and struggled for the prize on the ground and then Zach pulled away enough to get a foot up and kick him. The blow landed in his face and there was a sickening pop. Zach rolled backward and then to his feet and fought a gag reflex. He snatched the bottle from the man’s clutches. “Sorry!” he yelled, catching a last glimpse of him on the ground, his head reared up, blood and dust mingled into his mustache. “Sorry!” Zach turned and ran.

  A warning gun shot rang out and Zach turned to see the National Guard jeeps circling in close. The crowd huddled angrily. They were promised another water truck would arrive sooner rather than later. Zach hurried his bottle out of the park toward home. He needed to meet someone. To pair up. Perhaps his patient. Walking the streets alone with a bottle was a risk he didn’t want to take often.

  Back at the three-story building, he went to the roof and looked out at the city. Soon the people would be getting ready to settle into darkness, gathering ration candles, if they had them, the coming power outage about to dim the landscape.

  He opened his unit gallon and drank three units off before he could stop himself, and when he did, he felt as though he’d only wetted his lips, mere drops in the dry well of him. He found some empty canning jars, retrieved his permanent marker and sat in front of his unit gallon and concentrated on distributing a portion from each to a jar before he would allow himself another drink. Sherwood habit. He labeled the jars with their intended purpose.

  Jamal saw a young boy of nine or ten at the end of the street. He walked with a heavily practiced gait, swinging his brown arms aggressively and with flair. He wore a black sweatshirt and white sweatpants, negating entirely, in Jamal’s mind, the effect of cool the boy sought. But what did he know? He was already too old for street fashion. The boy was thin and looked like he needed a bath, three square meals a day, and the care of an attentive mother to set him back on some forward-facing track. None of which Jamal felt he’d turn down himself.

  The boy crossed the street toward them and his swagger faltered once as he made eye contact with them, and then intensified as he got close.

  “Y’all be looking for yo Rain-Joes?”

  “You’ve seen them?”

  “Check da house.” The boy pointed to the same house where the note claimed Charles was in charge.

  “Oh? Hey wait—” Jamal said, but the boy turned to walk away. Jamal called after him, “Who is Charles?” and he thought he saw a noticeable jerk in the boy’s walk, as if a marionette string had been yanked violently, throwing one leg in the wrong direction. The boy quickly regained his stride and was gone.

  “Somebody sent him,” Rick said.

  “We’re being watched,” Carl said.

  “Yep,” Rick said.

  “It’s a trap,” Carl said.

  “Yep,” Rick said.

  Jamal fought the desire to cut and run, fifteen-year-old memories running ghost-like over his anxieties.

  “My spidey sense is tingling,” Rick said.

  “Don’t say spidey sense,” Carl said, “just don’t say it.”

  “What? Why not?”

  “There’s no such word as spidey.”

  “It’s from—”

  “I know what the fuck it’s from,” Carl said. “But listen to it. There’s ‘spider’ and ‘spidery,’ there’s no ‘spidey.’”

  Rick deepened his voice and gave it an English accent, “My spidery senses are causing my fancies to tingle.”

  “Where is everybody?” Jamal said.

  They locked their bikes to a stop sign and kept watch on the house at the end of the street.

  A cloud passed over the sun and Jamal stared into the sky, seeing great clouds there like the front line of an infantry passing by. They would bring no rain, he knew, only dust.

  “Does anyone have a plan?” Jamal asked hopefully, feeling that the proper thing to say was: I have a plan, seeing as how he was in charge, and realizing that he was relinquishing some morsel of authority simply by asking the question.

  “Check out the house,” said Rick. He was digging in a flesh-colored fanny pack—which Jamal noticed for the first time was actually a pack and not part of the man’s flesh. He came up with an extra clip, which he put in his back pocket.

  They were so not a real army, Jamal thought, not the Going Street Brigade, and especially not the measly three of them. He wished he’d brought another fifty soldiers with him. He looked up the street for a Ranger to signal with, but the streets were dead empty in all directions.

  “You think they’re still alive?” Carl said.

  “I’m not thinking anything,” Rick said.

  “We can hope,” Jamal said. But he couldn’t imagine why anyone would go taking hostages. Life was cheap in the drought. Who would waste the water to keep a hostage alive?

  “This is going to creep me right out if we don’t start doing something right now,” Rick said.

  They fanned out and walked toward the house at the end of the street. On the right at the end of the block was what appeared to be a micro junkyard, with high fences and several dozen old junkers. There used to be big, angry dogs there, Jamal remembered, who would throw themselves against the fence to get at him as he walked by.

  Jamal signaled for Rick to go up the sta
irs of the house and knock while he covered him. The house had a tall porch with broad steps. It was built in the twenties, before the shop behind it had blocked off its backyard with a big concrete wall.

  Next to the door was a large, intact window that led to the living room, covered by a full curtain.

  Carl eased around the right side of the porch and managed to find a vantage where he could keep an eye on Rick.

  As Rick turned the doorknob, Jamal watched Rick’s body jerk with gunshot impacts and then fall against the door, which swung wide with the pressure. Jamal ducked and looked around wildly—the shots were coming from elsewhere, though he could see no gunmen. There was nowhere to run, except into the house. Jamal leapt up the side of the porch, nearly colliding with Carl, and felt one leg twitch away from him, an icy coolness there that began to yield pain. And then he was inside, dragging Rick’s body deeper into the house.

  After Jamal had been gone for ten hours, Gregor paced around the map room, blisters of anger and worry erupting from him in sharp bursts.

  Maid Marian sat on the big orange knit couch and observed how quickly the system had fallen apart without Zach. She was angry at him for not training others well enough. He’d become irreplaceable. And yet she had spent time with that convoluted brain, knew the feeling of irritated bafflement that came over her when he tried to explain how the system he’d created worked. He’d trained a horse only he could ride. When Zach was gone there was nothing left but to shoot the horse.

  “Tell me again where he is?” Gregor said, pointing at the piles of notes with his pipe.