Sherwood Nation: a novel

by Benjamin Parzybok

  It was obvious the neighborhoods had suffered—there were signs of violence and instability; people stood on their porches and looked out at them with fear. Their children were hungry and underfed, their houses dingy, their attire poor. But it was also clear that these had once been thriving neighborhoods, containing far more wealth than her initial Sherwood holdings.

  It was a proud day and she rode through the neighborhoods slowly and with her head up, speaking to whomever wished to speak to her. The people greeted her with varying warmth, unsure of how they were supposed to behave in front of her, many still gripping their welcome packet containing a note she’d written: “How things are done in Sherwood.” News over the past week had shifted, and so while they welcomed Maid Marian the hero, it was with excitement and uneasiness that they saw Rangers ride through their streets.

  The entire day the border moved outward until it finally came to rest. This gave Sherwood a solid chunk of I-84, a squirrely freeway that plunged into the heart of Portland from the east and then ended.

  They acquired building and shopping districts, grocery stores and gas stations—most of them defunct, but a few persisted. The neighborhood was a far larger and richer resource than Woodlawn, though the thought of that lost neighborhood came as a sting to Renee. She wondered how it felt to be in city control again. Did they feel forsaken? Or had they despised her? For now, the border was sealed and heavily guarded.

  Recruiting centers were formed to solicit new Rangers and water carriers, doctors and nurses, teachers, builders, and farmers. What busy ants we are, Renee thought, and felt the satisfaction of industry and momentum. She toured an unused movie theater and on a whim ordered funds allotted to ready it for showing films again. She felt unstoppable.

  A news team followed Maid Marian all day. They were given exclusive access to her. She joked with them and played her part, empathetic and reasonable, decisive and optimistic. These are no end-times, she said to herself as she shook hands and squeezed the shoulders of children, as she absorbed resource reports and coordinated her Rangers with Gregor, there is no end. This time is simply a tunnel, from one time to the next.

  The city had not expected this. While they were still in chaos, Renee turned to her media crew and put out an open call for Portland citizens. We have space, she told the camera. Move your family here, come be a part of Sherwood, live with a government that works. There are empty houses and there is real work to be done. Several hundred made it across the border, carrying meager possessions or idling in vehicles piled with belongings before the city closed off the new border. The darkness is a passage. I do not seed the violence.

  Gregor straddled the border at NE 37th and the freeway, the new edge of their world, and felt a vast satisfaction at the work he’d done. Evidence of his work was everywhere. He tried not think about how thin they’d spread themselves, how much they depended on every little system working flawlessly, and how the city could not leave this unanswered. He feared the revenge would be quick and hard.

  Night after night Martin walked the streets, driven by an unflagging desire for revenge. He searched for a gun, and hoped for a chance encounter with her. He risked visits to old contacts, but most were gone or wore Ranger garb now. He broke into houses and rifled all the places he would keep a gun were he to live there. A plan needed a man with a gun. Or perhaps: a man needed a gun when he was not clever enough to plan.

  He used to keep guns locked in a cabinet in his den. He stood in front of his house now in daylight, wearing one of Celestina’s many wigs, his suit covered in the fine dust that blew in the air. His former front yard bustled now with young children, and he watched in amazement.

  It’s a fucking daycare, he realized. She’d taken it and converted it. He stayed for some time watching the young nannies make up games for the children to play. He wondered what his old contacts would say were they to happen by, a satchel of dope tucked under their arm, or some piece they needed smuggled, asking a nanny his whereabouts.

  In lieu of a gun, he carried a couple of screwdrivers, the tips of which he’d ground down to points with the grinder in Celestina’s garage. The handles of these he pinched between his middle finger and palm, the points hidden up his sleeves, until the occasion arose.

  He came out of his reverie in front of his old house and realized something was happening. Hordes of people were in the street, all of them walking south. He adjusted his wig and mingled in with the flow of people around him.

  They were jovial and didn’t seem in a hurry. He heard the word “invasion.” Finally, he thought, the city has taken back control of this piss-ant little experiment. But these were not the victims of an invasion.

  He walked with wonder over the spot of the old border as it was being disassembled by Rangers.

  He followed the crowd deep into the new neighborhoods, disbelieving what had happened. How could the city have let this happen? And then he saw her. She rode a bicycle with an assortment of followers and made her slow way through the street, waving and greeting her new constituents as she went. Kids and adults alike trailed behind her.

  She looked older. Everything about her movements had changed, or perhaps these movements had been there but were now refined. From a distance he watched her touch the head of a child, shake a man’s hand, embrace a woman. Her hair spilled in braids from a black Ranger cap. She wore a green workman’s shirt, the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, and thigh-length jean shorts. Hardly an appropriate outfit for the queen, he thought.

  Martin hobbled along behind, keeping his one eye fixed on her, held her there in his cyclops death grip. More than once he was slapped on the back by a fellow walker, a look of exuberance on the man’s face. “How about this!” one said. They believed they were being delivered to the promised land. He wondered how many would get a “notice of exile.”

  He huddled in closer, pushing to get past those in front. In the inner circle of her progress a ring of Rangers kept the new citizens from turning into a mob, and one of these Rangers impartially blocked his way. He was only feet from her now. One lunge away. He squeezed the handles of his screwdrivers until his palms ached. This is for you, Fred.

  A woman holding a young child yelled out a question. It came out in a confused blurt, the pressure of so many other questions behind it: “When the water—will?—how does it work?”

  “Hello,” Maid Marian said, and though she must have been asked the question fifty times, she made her way toward the questioner and the crowd opened in front of her. She put her hand on the child’s back, and the child laid her head on her mother’s shoulder. Maid Marian smiled. “Water will come right to your front door. Your first delivery is on its way, it will be there today so stay close to home. Your Sherwood water carrier will have many answers for you, ask as many back as you want.” Maid Marian smiled again and the questioner dipped her head.

  Martin saw the woman nearly shrink, caught surprised in the glow of her. Maid Marian laid a gentle hand on the woman’s shoulder, and then went on to the next.

  Martin pushed around the inner circle of Rangers to get in front. He would give them even more. He would make her a legend. A martyr.

  He pulled his wig off and jammed it into his suit coat pocket. Look at me, he willed. In her magnanimousness, would the queen now forgive him? Would she accept him into this homeland, give him a home? He wished his hands were free of the screwdrivers so he could raise his hands into the air like the others who asked for her attention, but his hands were not free. He squeezed them, prodded the points into the crook of his elbows, piercing the skin. One for the heart and one for the lung.

  He trailed along with them, jostled by the friendly crowd as it grew. When he was in front, he hollered out, not six feet from her, “I want to work! I want to volunteer!” His voice boomed from his chest, husky and virile, and around him people cheered and clapped for him. It felt exhilarating
.

  She turned toward him and made her way closer. Her smile on him now like a tractor beam. He felt his knees go weak. He saw that down the inside of her right arm she bore a tattoo that said: There Is No End, and it disoriented him. She came closer; she was going to come right to him, to embrace him. Did she recognize him? Her face was complex. There was warmth and power there, yielding and crushing. She was their mother, he realized suddenly, who gave them life and whose word was law.

  She leaned in and put her arms around him and he reflexively embraced her, the screwdrivers gripped with shaking hands against the small of her back. He closed his one working eye, the other burned in its socket. He freed the points and heard someone behind her gasp. He shuddered once in her embrace, euphoric and conflicted, and she gripped him harder. Now, he thought. Her mouth whispered into his ear, a quiet shush of words he heard over the din of the crowd.

  “Do it,” she whispered.

  He steadied the points against her back and willed himself. But in his mind, instead of a well of violence and revenge to draw on, he saw the faces of Celestina and Rachel, waiting at home. It paralyzed his hands, the intensity of the screwdriver grip causing them to ache. He was unable to do what he’d come to do. He let his arms fall slack to his sides then, all the energy gone. She turned and maybe she said something else and maybe not and then she was with the crowd again and they were chanting something and he did not move.

  He stood where he was as the crowd pulled away. He was alone in the street, far from home. His hands hurt from the feverish clutch. He put the screwdrivers in his coat pocket next to the wig. Across his front was the pressure-memory of her embrace, her shoulders against his chest, her breasts against his solar plexus. He felt weak and bewildered and began the long walk home.

  Cora wept at the sight of Sherwood Rangers and citizens streaming into her street. She stood with a hand on each of her child’s heads, feeling like they’d made it home safe. She’d steered her family through the disaster until help had come. And boy, had it come. Faced with an overwhelming number of forces from Sherwood, their city police border patrol quickly surrendered.

  They watched cautiously out their window as the city police were marched westward along the old border of Fremont in a great line. They were pushed out without their vehicles and weapons onto the corner of Fremont and Martin Luther King Boulevard, ejected back into the city.

  When the police were gone, Nevel and Cora and Jason and Luisa sat on the porch and watched. They waved to their neighbors and received ecstatic waves back. Nevel struggled for how to record this, the feeling of time rushing into the point of a pin. Like a moon landing, he thought, or some deliverance from disaster—everyone held their breath in the collective excitement and trepidation, united by its momentousness.

  Jason wanted to know if the policemen being marched out would get shot. He sat halfway down the steps and banged his cast against the top stair to relieve some of the itch within. Nevel had heard Sherwood enter their play—whether it was cars or spaceships or dress-up, Sherwoodians were the good guys and their powers, were you to take it from Jason, were enormous and unstoppable.

  “Oh heck no, they’ll be fine. But we’ll have to get fancy green outfits like these people,” he said.

  “Really, can we?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  The main contingent of frontline Rangers moved on and they watched as people from both countries eyed the border that was. Sherwood citizens worked on it now. They removed items that had blocked the way, cleaned up trash, and shooed away the border bloodsuckers that always lingered on the city side—bewildered vendors and smugglers and coyotes that did not know to which country they belonged now. The Sherwooders looked up at Nevel and his family on their porch and waved, stepping lively as they rolled up the cyclone fencing and removed the wood structures that held it in place.

  “Well. The tunnel is—” Nevel said.

  Cora patted his shoulder. “It’s all yours again, deary. You were a hero there for a little bit. I liked that.”

  “Really, you did?”

  “Yeah, it was funny.”

  “Funny?”

  “In a good way.”

  “Like an action comedy? With the quips?”

  “Yes, you were funny with the quips. You were quippy. And very dramatic.” Cora leaned in close and wrapped her arms around her children, and then pulled Nevel into the circle too.

  They sat and watched the goings-on, as a steady stream of workers from Sherwood crossed over the border.

  “Look.” Cora pointed as four bicycles rode by their house. They were water carriers. Each pulled a wagon behind with a stack of thirty or forty unit gallons. It was a truly glorious thing to see, those translucent bottles trailing behind them, the most precious of cargoes out in the open and out for delivery.

  “They’re going to get robbed,” Cora said. “I don’t think the people here are ready for that yet.”

  Nevel followed their progress down the street and saw all of his neighbors on their porches, like foreign exchange students at some function in their honor. Hesitant and out of their element, certain they’d confused some vital message. Some wandered off their porches and followed along, trailing the Rangers or water carriers to see what happened.

  “What do you think the city will do?” Cora said.

  “Will we get bombed?” Jason said and made a whistling sound and subsequent explosion.

  “Would you like that, buddy?”

  “Nevel,” Cora said.

  “No! Of course not!” Jason said.

  “Sorry—I really have no idea, but the important thing is that we’ll be safe. This is forcing the city’s hand. They’ll have to become even more like Sherwood. And that’s a good thing.” Nevel thought of the mayor, his already-enraged heart pumping angrily away in his chest. “I would not want to be running things in either place.”

  “What? Why?” Jason said earnestly, wanting to dip into par with the conversation. Nevel grinned at the boy and thought how someday, provided they all lived through this, he would make a fine person.

  “Remember everything Princess Leia had to do? With telling people where to be and in charge of things? And how people were always shooting at her? Well, I wouldn’t want to be Princess Leia right now.”

  “I’d be Luke Skywalker!” Jason said. “Who would you be, Mom?”

  “Luke’s mom.”

  “And Luisa can be Darth Vader,” Jason said charitably.

  “Douf Vado!” Luisa hollered with a pitch and proximity that made Nevel’s ears ring.

  A woman biked up to the bottom of their steps, a great load of water bottles stacked up behind her, and wished them a good morning.

  Nevel and Cora stood, wondering if there was some protocol or secret handshake they should know. This was their moment, that which they’d talked about for months. The iconic water carrier.

  Cora descended the stairs and shook the woman’s hand. She had a pretty face and black hair and tattoos of what appeared to be gears and bicycle wheels and ships’ helms up both muscular arms. Jason and Luisa followed Cora down and stood, awed and interested, openly inspecting the woman as she chatted, looking for signs of her foreign Sherwood-ness.

  “It all happened so fast, right? Here—” She pulled a sheet of paper from the back of her trailer “—this is the Sherwood welcome letter.” She handed the sheet to Cora. Nevel could see his wife wanted to devour it on the spot, to hug and kiss this alien woman, to hop on the back of the trailer and begin delivering water.

  The woman ruffled the kids’ heads and said to Jason, “Hey, chico, how many people in your family.”

  “There used to be five but our cat died.”

  She made a sympathetic noise and encouraged them to come look at the Sherwood chickens. Then she handed each of the ki
ds a unit gallon from her trailer. “These are for you. Careful getting up those steps.”

  “There’s lots in there.” The woman gestured to the paper clutched tightly in Cora’s hands. “But for us, you and me—” She wiped her brow. “Phew, going to be a beautiful day. For you and me the most important part is the note system. You’ve got a sick kid, you tell me, you need some help or have some concerns or have an idea, you tell me. It’s not a democracy, Maid Marian is in control, but you’ve got a voice, and participation is recommended.”

  “So I can write, so say I write I want to work on the farms?” Cora said.

  “Great, yes—though here, I need you to fill this out to catalog your skills and interests.”

  They took the skills sheet and Nevel had a moment of anxiety over how many blanks were under the question: Skills in which you have some proficiency. “Can I send a note now? To tell her—” Nevel said, “uh, write ‘tunnel’ question mark.”

  “Maid Marian herself won’t necessarily read it.”

  “That’s OK,” Nevel said, “let’s try it out.”

  She shook their hands. “I hope you like Sherwood as much as I do. See you tomorrow.”

  Cora and Nevel bickered about who got to read the welcome sheet first. They sat at the top of the stairs, each clutching a side, and read it together. Nevel admired the logo—a bow leaning against a unit gallon quiver, full of water vial arrows. Even in the use of whitespace and formatting, he knew they had someone competent running what he supposed was their marketing department. Perhaps he could work again, he thought. And then, with clarity, he realized that Zach would be a big part of that marketing engine.