Sherwood Nation: a novel

by Benjamin Parzybok

  Rachel turned her face away from him and stared at the wall. “This place would be hell if it weren’t for Maid Marian. She’s saving us.”

  His temper took control of him for a moment and he crossed the room and brought his fist down on the dresser.

  Celestina jumped and fled the room.

  “Sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g!” he sung, briefly overwhelmed with hatred, and then he slammed the door behind him.

  Celestina kept a pile of scratch paper on the counter and he grabbed half a dozen sheets and a pencil and sat with his head in his hands. In his gut boiled the same shameful feeling he’d felt as a nine-year-old playground bully. He was going to make a plan. He was going to be a hero, for once.

  With a limped gait Jamal paced back and forth in the dining room, striding alongside the body of Rick, who had not made a sound for some hours. The wound in his calf was keeping him awake with its dull ache.

  He didn’t have it in him to check Rick for a pulse and didn’t care whether they spotted him from across the street, through the ragged holes in the curtains, pacing back and forth like some wooden doll in a shooting game at the carnival.

  He was sick of waiting. Carl remained where he was, as if made of stone, a gargoyle watchman looking out into the darkness, mumbling his demon curses.

  If Rick was dead, they could run and for this reason Jamal couldn’t help but hope a little that the man had passed into the aether. Through the night they’d talked on and off in quiet tones, about the war and the drug wars. Rick had been cogent about half the time.

  “Carl!” he hollered. Eighteen hours in this tomb and he could feel madness at the periphery, an option that he could take if he were the sort of man that had the inclination. His adrenal glands were spent, he was sure, and the fear nagged on him like some old, foul sweater, an itch and a weight around his neck. Thirst and hunger and the dead, trapped with a gargoyle. Certainly there were those who, faced with the choices of death or an indeterminate stay, might eventually choose the easy detour of insanity. Who might burst from the light bonds of reason and lash out into unknown territory of the psyche. “Carl!”

  “What.”

  “Let’s shoot at them.”

  He couldn’t for the life of him figure out what their assailants were waiting for, other than the inevitable passing of their opponents into madness, or passing from thirst. Jamal’s mouth tasted like he’d chewed and swallowed a medium-sized doormat. The physical craving of water dominated his thoughts.

  Jamal repositioned himself at his window, which showed signs of eighteen hours of anxious living. Scraps of paper were spread around and neglected. Wrappers from the rest of his meager supply of food and all of his possessions formed a sort of nest.

  He looked out the window again and saw the first traces of dawn coming and that cheered him, for he knew whatever was going to happen was destined to happen now during daylight. The house across from them was quiet and still.

  “Ready when you are. I’ll take the first floor and you take the second.” Jamal had appropriated Rick’s gun for Carl and between the three guns they had seventy bullets. They agreed to shoot two bullets each.

  Jamal fired one in each window on the first floor, on either side of the door. There was no glass and so he couldn’t honestly be sure if he’d hit his mark. His ears rang from the pistol shots and he looked up and down the street for any sign of activity, trying to keep out of view as much as possible. There was no response and so they set to waiting again.

  An hour later Jamal saw what they’d been waiting for. An armored SUV with four police pulled in at the end of the block, around the corner from the micro junkyard. They ducked low as they exited the vehicle, their rifles in hand, dressed in helmets and full gear.

  He watched the police advance on their house and felt hope leave him. They were not there to apprehend the occupants, not in Sherwood. “You watching?” he said, but there was no answer from Carl. Woodlawn was under city control, he was sure now. These were captured lands. He was over the border in enemy territory. The city was going to take him hostage.

  The police took positions. They had scopes on their rifles. One drew near, taking cover behind a burnt-out car. He sighted through his scope and then moved forward. Jamal heard a double-blast from Carl’s room and saw the advancing Guardsmen’s shoulder jerk and then he fell to the ground. A few seconds later he heard a barrage of bullets rip through Carl’s room.

  He yelled for Carl but there was no answer.

  Jamal leaned back from the window and used the reflection on the blade of his knife to try to see where they were, but the blurry distortion seemed what horror movies were made of.

  “Where’s my gun, blood brother?” Rick whispered.

  “Rick—oh god,” Jamal said, surprised the man was alive and grateful not to be alone, even if it was his last minute. “We’re really fried here,” he whispered.

  “Where’s my gun?”

  Jamal quickly crawled to Carl’s room and avoided looking at the man’s body, which had fallen much farther from the window than he’d imagined possible. The wall around the window was riddled with holes. He gathered both guns and scrambled back to the dining room.

  “It’s the like SWAT or something,” Jamal said. “They have scopes. They’ll have to come up on the front porch to get a shot.”

  “Drag me into position,” Rick said.

  Jamal dragged Rick through his own blood to the small section of wall that jutted out between the dining room and the living room, in view of the window and the door, and he took up position on the opposite side, and they waited.

  Jamal tried his best not to shake as they waited for the first trooper to mount the stairs and come into view. Even then, Rick and he would only get off a shot or two. The soldiers may just wing in tear gas or burn the place down.

  Across from him Rick looked horrid. Blood had managed to spread to just about everything—his face, the gun, and the great swath of it that trailed from the big stain in the middle of the floor.

  “I thought you were dead,” Jamal said. He faced toward the window with his gun aimed but needed to talk to calm himself. He could sense them out there, creeping nearer like swamp alligators.

  “Takes a lot to kill old man Ricky,” Rick whispered, “Won’t be long now.” And Jamal wasn’t sure he preferred this new cogency. He could have appreciated some optimistic delirium.

  The first helmet bobbed into view. Just above the window sill they could see it. They trained their guns on it, Jamal mouthing wait, wait, wait, wait, to himself to keep from squeezing the trigger.

  He watched the helmet bob there for a moment, its cargo indecisive, and then turn around and descend from view. “Fuck,” he whispered, “did he see us?” His body was overtaken with fear and he placed his hands on his knees to keep them from shaking. He waited a split second more for some projectile to fly through the window. Then he eased forward, walking in a squat. The helmet was retreating down the steps. He heard shouting now.

  As the street came into view he stood in disbelief—there was a sea of Green Rangers. Green Rangers were running into the yellow house; others stripped the National Guard of their weapons. “The rangers are here!” Jamal opened the front door and saw his father standing behind the four troopers who were on their knees. Rangers were pulling men from the yellow house and lining them up. There were Rangers retrieving weapons and confiscating the SUV. He called out as his father fired the first shot, shooting one of the troopers in the back of the head, execution style. Jamal jumped, sickened by the raw violence of it, by the way the man jerked and slumped forward. Immediately two of the men in line on their knees came to their feet and ran and Gregor shot them down in mid-stride with blazing precision. A silence emanated out from the act and the world slowed down to a snail’s pace as he watched his father raise his gun to the la
st trooper.

  He yelled no but it was absorbed in another gunshot. Jamal saw how the Rangers fanned wider with each shot. One bent over and threw up into the street; others stood grim where they were.

  Jamal sprinted down the stairs and ran into the street and chaos. His father shot another and the men farther down the line were wailing and begging. He put his hand on his father’s shoulder and spun him around. Gregor turned with his gun, an animal violence in his eyes, a blood lust, and for a moment Jamal thought his father might shoot him too. There was no recognition there.

  “Dad,” Jamal said, and he watched his father’s face come back to itself from a great distance.

  One of the men in the execution line fainted and keeled over.

  “I thought you were dead,” Gregor said, his voice a flatline. “We’ve been finding bodies.”

  Jamal pointed back up to the house and then couldn’t find any more words to say. He was acutely conscious of interfering with his commanding officer in front of others. He wanted to embrace the old man, a boxer’s hug, and the rest of him wanted to run from this horror. “Do not do this. Please, Dad. Bind them and take them back,” Jamal whispered. “We’ll figure it out from there.”

  Gregor shook his head no. He turned and held his gun to the head of a young man who wept openly. There were five men left on their knees and four dead on the ground. Gregor held the gun there and Jamal whispered please and held his breath, forcing himself to keep his eyes open. Finally Gregor pulled his gun up and holstered it.

  “Bind these men and take them back,” he said.

  Jamal slowly let his breath out as the world snapped back into motion and the Rangers began to move again. He stared at the back of his father’s head. He was nauseous. He wondered if the executions had been for him, in retribution for his own supposed death. Jamal shuddered and turned to find two Rangers to help him put together a stretcher for Rick.

  Renee and Zach slept until the sunlight was harsh in the room. The world outside was aglow with dust and it filtered through the air in the room. When she woke, Renee rolled onto him. She could feel the weight of responsibility coming back, the urgency to return to Sherwood as soon as possible and so she sought that which could take her mind away from it for a moment. Her country was falling apart and she needed him there to help her decipher the data, or she needed to leave him. She could not waver in a limbo of escapism and responsibility-dodging any more, and with these thoughts on her mind, she did him as Maid Marian, so that Zach felt as if his hip bone were being ground into a thin powder, like she was mixing him up as some salve to be applied to her country. Her hands were like talons that cut into his wrists.

  She understood that she’d gone to sleep next to him as one person and woken up as someone else.

  When they were done, she breathed hard next to him and then quieted.

  “So,” Zach said, feeling how radically things had changed in a few hours. “Where do we stand?”

  “I don’t know,” Renee said. She sat up on the bed and faced away from him. “I have to go back to Sherwood tonight. You have to come with me.”

  Zach marveled at how she had adopted the voice of command, how she rarely asked for opinion or preference. “No,” he said. “I can’t, Maid Marian,” he said.

  He watched her turn toward him in anger. “Don’t call me—” she started, and then she turned forward again and was quiet.

  They sat silent for a long while. He heard a siren drone by and then shouting in the street. It would soon be time to go pick up his ration. He stared at her naked back, lithe and strong, accustomed still to hard work, a back used to being the first to pick up and wield a shovel. Hair that fell past her shoulder blades, out of braids for once.

  “Yesterday night, before we arrived, I signaled on the water tower. Did you see it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t answer?”

  “No.”

  “But you were watching for it?”

  “I was.”

  “Do you still love me?” She turned to look at him.

  Zach didn’t expect the question and he didn’t know who was asking it. “Do you?” he said.

  She was still, and as she paused tension gathered into the room, each additional moment he desired to get up and flee. Then she nodded subtly. “Yes, I do.”

  “OK,” he said, “OK.” He felt flustered and sat up quickly. He pulled his knees to his chest and drew the sheet tautly down over them. He toyed with saying he loved her back but he didn’t know. He was afraid of showing any soft spot that might get crushed. She glanced once back and turned away and then he knew he’d let her question lapse. He’d waited too long.

  He wished he could reel back that moment when he could have said “I love you too” easily and without the complications of justifying or proving or explaining. He thought he did—the woman who arrived the night before and came up to his bed—he’d been happy to have her there. Happy—such a foreign word, such a mysterious contraption relationships were, of which he’d had as many as could be counted on one hand and leave enough fingers for going about their own business.

  Renee dropped her head and began to do her braids. When she finished she put her palms against her temples. He wished she’d turn around now.

  A wave of impish adolescence overtook him, a handy last resort for fleeing adult troubles and difficult emotional situations. He kicked her, landing a nudging insistent blow to her flank. She turned and gave him an irritated and disgusted look and he kicked her again.

  “The fuck?” she said. She looked hurt and insulted and he kicked her again and then she pulled back and socked him in the thigh.

  “Oh!” he called out and grabbed his leg, which convulsed with pain and then he kicked her again with both feet, strong enough to dislodge her from the edge of the bed.

  “You fucker,” she said and stood up, and before she could walk from the room he leapt up, got his hands around her shoulders and pulled her down on top of him. She struggled to get away and he had to clutch at her back and hold on. She punched him in the side and again in the rib cage but the blows had softened. She took a bite of his shoulder and bit until he hollered out and then she let go and kissed him there and they were still.

  It felt good to have her on top of him, a human blanket.

  “I used to be able to hear birds out my window,” Zach said.

  “Really?” she said, the statement obvious enough to her that she wondered if he was mentioning it as a symbol of some kind in their conversation, or just being nostalgic.

  “Yeah.” He wrapped his arms around her lower back. “It’s complicated, Renee. I would like to be together. But I’m not sure there’s any room for that.”

  She turned and put her head face down on his shoulder, her eyes an inch from the red bite mark there.

  “You know?” he said.

  “I’d like to try again,” she said.

  “But is she up there? Is there a Renee in Sherwood?”

  “I’ll figure it out,” she said. “I’ll make room for it, this relationship. That is what I want. I will make it formal. And in the quiet moments, it will be just Renee and Zach.”

  He didn’t say anything and they lay there until they heard Señor Nombre call out and Bea clunking around and then he said OK.

  Nevel and Cora sat down to watch the morning news with excitement. They had access to Sherwood now and there was a feeling of sudden dual-citizenship, of being able to travel to a paradisiacal island any time they wanted, and so with an extra thrill they sat to watch for any mentions of their new country.

  There was a full-time Sherwood news crew now, a journalist and cameraman. When that night’s Sherwood segment showed, in the microsecond before the journalist spoke, before he knew the camera was running, you could see the grimness of the news on his face.


  They watched and held hands as they saw live footage of Rangers searching houses. Sherwood citizens stood on the streets in their bathrobes as rangers went through their houses, house after house.

  “They searched my house,” a woman who appeared disheveled and agitated said into the camera, and then turned to the journalist who interviewed her uncertainly.

  “And the reason they gave you for the search?”

  “They said they were looking for a fugitive. I had to stand outside while all these green goons went through my house.”

  “I’m very sorry you had to suffer through that. Was anything damaged or taken?”

  “No—” she turned to the camera—“can I take the green goons part back? Can you cut that?”

  After the interview the journalist said they had contacted Maid Marian’s office for comment and received none so far.

  The view switched back to the news anchors, who wanted to know what had happened to the people who were detained.

  The journalist’s picture from a time past appeared in the upper right hand corner of the screen, looking plumper and more innocent, and the anchor faced toward that. “I haven’t heard about anyone detained,” Brian said, “but if there were—there are no jails. So these people would be pulled in to forced labor for the territory, or simply exiled. Sent to live in Portland.”

  “But she wasn’t even there,” Cora said, “right?”

  Nevel sunk into the couch, sensing that their hole into paradise was like a whirlpool in the center of their house, sucking them in. It was their escape hatch there, or their line to the underworld.