Sherwood Nation: a novel

by Benjamin Parzybok

  “I’d still like to see the theater thing,” offered Sherry hesitantly. She leaned against the door frame, one foot toe first to the floor. She smiled at Erik, and Erik waved back. She was probably no more than seventeen, maybe an honors student, Thom thought. She’d tried to do something with her makeup, under the influence of the city, that her clothes and hair couldn’t keep up with.

  “Not with him you won’t,” said her father.

  “Alright, how about giving the knife back, Erik,” said Thom. He swallowed twice. “With the money.”

  “I don’t have the money,” Erik said, not moving.

  “I have some money,” said Tree. Everyone stared at Tree as he went to his room and returned a minute later with a small stack of bills. Tree took the knife from Erik’s hand and handed the knife to Sherry’s father and the money to Sherry.

  “Thank you. We won’t trouble you any further,” Sherry’s father said and shot a dark look at Erik.

  After the door closed, the three roommates held their places for a moment. A frame frozen in time, the transition between outside conflict and inside conflict. Actors repositioning, new arguments and explanations boiling up. Tree and Thom turned to Erik.

  “I meant to buy the tickets.”

  “I believe you,” Tree said.

  Erik studied Tree for a moment and then continued with confidence. “And they were sold out. But when I went to look for her, I couldn’t find her.”

  Tree nodded, and Thom didn’t say anything.

  “Is the mustache supposed to be a disguise?” Thom finally asked.

  “What?” Erik rubbed his forefinger like a jigsaw across the fur on his upper lip.

  “That’s a real mustache then?”

  “It grows kind of fast.”

  Thom nodded again, turned to Tree. “And how much money did you give her.”

  “Fifty-eight dollars.”

  “How did you know how much?”

  Tree looked startled. “I don’t know, I just did.” He blushed brightly.

  “Were you involved in this, Tree?”

  “Yeah! How did you know? What’s up with that?” Erik stepped forward, taking the opportunity to turn the focus. “I’m not the paranoid type, but I’m pretty sure, no no no, I’m positive I didn’t mention it.”

  “I, I think I dreamed it.”

  Thom let out a great roaring rumble of gas and both roommates turned toward him, polite, startled smiles on their faces. Had he said something? they seemed to be asking.

  “Oh man, was that real!”

  “I have a stomach—”

  “You just came in and grabbed the knife from that sucker, just like that. You were amazing. You had them so handled!”

  Thom felt so immediately grateful that Erik wasn’t talking about his flatulence that he allowed himself to laugh in relief.

  “And then you grabbed the knife from me,” Erik said. “I didn’t know who was going to stab who!”

  “And I knew how much money to give her,” Tree said, trying out a laugh.

  Erik frowned. “I still think that’s spooky. But I do appreciate the loan. You know I’m good for it, right?”

  Tree nodded.

  “Alright then, let’s go have some pie and beer,” Thom said.

  “We should team up,” Erik said excitedly. “All three of us. We should make some kind of a team.”

  “I think you mean gang,” Thom said.

  “Hey, I’m not talking about illegal stuff.” He turned, trapping Thom just outside of the kitchen. “I’m talking about some kind of enterprise.”

  “That’s a spaceship, right?” Thom joked to no apparent effect.

  “I’m talking about a business venture. With your brawn—and brains—and my, you know—seriously! Think about it.”

  “Tree wants to join.” Thom finally pushed through the bottleneck of Erik into the kitchen. “He’s got a plan.”

  “Oh . . . ,” Tree said and stared at the floor.

  If you were to squint from the roof of the apartment building midway up the West Hills, with Portland proper below, you could almost, with practice and a shifting of scale, morph the scattered buildings into the teepees of the people who’d inhabited the riverside some five hundred years ago, at the same time an explorer from Spain was rediscovering Cuba, the land their forefathers had discovered eighty thousand years prior. Or at least that was the legend. Men had been absentmindedly discovering land they’d already traversed, built civilizations upon, fucked and cried on for as long as there had been men.

  Among the teepees below, a society pulsed, children were fed, art was made. There was a hierarchy, and at the bottom of it were the unchosen who huddled together and wondered what purpose they were intended for.

  By Friday, it was fairly clear to Thom that going out into the world was negative. He preferred to traverse and re-traverse the small follies he already knew his way around—the loose shower knob, the stubborn toilet, the web of lies that kept his mother proud of him, the other two unchosen. A certain emotional neutrality was reached in the apartment. Occasionally that neutrality passed into positive ground—laughing about knife encounters, eating popcorn in front of the TV, drinking beer in the kitchen. And sometimes it passed into the negative—knife encounters, for example. But a makeshift brotherhood emerged. Thom spent the day doing as Tree had recommended: not looking for work. He spent the day on the couch.

  Erik decided he certainly wasn’t going out into the world. This was his second trick in one week that had gone awry and now he feared simply stepping through the front door. Outside he was a wanted man; inside he was comfortable enough. Bored, but comfortable.

  There were many little mysteries in the apartment that worried Tree: the drapes across from his room that always closed when he glanced over, the phone without a caller, the older man who stationed himself on the front stoop, watching them come and go, and the large couch that lulled him to sleep.

  The couch wasn’t free until late afternoon, after Thom had moved to his room and Erik had sated himself on bad television. Tree removed all his wirework and pulled off the cushions. Something about this couch, he thought. There was a nagging in his mind, a leftover fleck of dream or a mishandled scrap of intuition, nothing more than a reminder that the couch was an item that required some kind of attention. He tucked his hands down into the crevasses, squeezed the cushions, put his ear to it. He tentatively touched his tongue to the armrest and recoiled from the smell of Erik’s BO. He tipped the couch onto its back. The underside revealed little. The uneven and haphazard stitching led him to guess it was handmade, or at least had once been repaired. However he tried, he couldn’t pry the backing off, and the thread used for the stitching was incredibly strong, resisting even a knife. Finally he loosened a seam and opened up a gap so that he could see into the intestines of the couch.

  The couch sighed—there was no other way to describe it. A faint smell spilled out: spines of old books, flowers past prime, the smell of things so long dead that only a nasal whisper remained. Tree realized he’d fallen back. Had he fainted? He leaned forward, but the gap had closed and the couch again smelled like a couch ought to smell.

  The disaster came late on Sunday night. Erik was asleep on the couch and Thom and Tree were in their rooms, but the apartment above thumped with activity. An inebriated romantic encounter between a gymnast and a horse jockey had gotten a bit too creative. A table next to a waterbed was upturned. A lit candle from the table rolled next to the bed, catching a small pile of newspapers, dirty laundry, and a book of matches on fire. The fire licked at the underside of the waterbed, burning a hole that drowned the small fire. Fate lent a push, however, and several powerful pneumatic jostlings by the pair atop the waterbed opened the hole wider and pushed the water out with great throbbing force until the couple noti
ced they were sinking. By the time they had their wits about them, half the bed had leaked onto the floor. They ran for towels—which were useless against the massive flood of water—then gathered a meager collection of pots and pans that could not hold the gallons still flowing from the bed in biblical proportions.

  Erik woke startled and flailing from a dream in which a horse had been pissing on him. He leapt from the couch and flipped on the light switch to see their apartment turned into a waterfall. Frantic pounding footsteps sounded from the apartment above. Water bowed the sheetrock in the center of the ceiling and had broken through the plaster. The green shag rug had taken on the appearance of a swamp.

  “Tree! Thom! Ho-lee shit!”

  He ran down the hallway, pounded his fists on his roommates’ doors and yelled, “Wake the hell up, goddamnit!” He gathered all the towels out of the bathroom. In the living room, he let the towels drop as he realized he didn’t have the faintest idea what he was going to do with them. Thom appeared in the hallway, his eyes wide as searchlights, and Tree appeared a moment later.

  “What, what did you do?” Thom said, staring over Erik’s shoulder at the wreckage of the living room.

  “I didn’t do anything!”

  “Wow,” Tree said, “this is really . . . really.” He tapped his temple with his forefinger repeatedly.

  A rapid, angry banging came from the door. Erik sloshed across to open it and found that the swollen rug had sealed the door shut. He put his foot against the wall, his hands firmly around the doorknob, and pulled with all his might. His hands slipped and he landed on his back in the swamp water. He got up and managed to yank the door open a crack, letting water into the hallway. A very stout, enraged woman shook her fists and yelled at him to Turn his goddamn water off, he was sinking them back to the fucking Stone Age!

  “It’s upstairs, upstairs!” he said breathlessly and pointed at the ruined ceiling. She pounded off, presumably toward the upstairs.

  “Power cords!” Thom yelled.

  Tree jumped in the air like a stung fish, curving and turning, and landed on his back on the edge of the television, hurling it to the floor and pulling its power cord from out of the socket, stopping the electricity from surging through the water.

  “Holy shit!” Erik waded toward Tree to help him up.

  “I’m looking for more power cords,” Thom yelled and rushed around the apartment, a great spray of water leaping up from each footfall. He unplugged two more and saw that the downpour was beginning to slow.

  Tree was laid out on his back on the couch, slow drips landing on his knees, lip, and sternum. Erik was angrily sloshing around.

  “How you doing, Tree?” asked Thom.

  “Nothing is broken, I think. I don’t feel great though.”

  “You’ll be sore. That was a hellish fall. But shit, you saved us, I bet.”

  “Not the TV though,” Tree said. The three looked at the TV, upside down in a corner, surrounded by water, like a shipwreck stuck in the surf.

  “Probably not,” Thom said. “Doesn’t look good for the TV. Or the apartment.”

  “What in the fuck?” Thom raised palms toward the upstairs, or the sky. Or God.

  “Waterbed upstairs,” Erik said. “Some kind of fire underneath it. That lady came back. She’s so mad.” Erik smiled. “I mean, she’s mad. The whole waterbed let loose. I’m mad too, I guess. All the water in here is soaking the apartment below us, the poor suckers.”

  “This is really screwed,” Thom said. “Let’s get out of here. I’m treating everyone to breakfast. Does your car still work, Erik?”

  “If it doesn’t, at least it’s dry.”

  Outside, rain was streaming from a black sky. “Celestial waterbed,” Thom joked and was ignored. The three piled into Erik’s car and headed for an all-night diner across town, black smoke curling up behind them, an ocean of rain in front. Every once in a while Erik would bang on the steering wheel and curse.

  The restaurant was full of the regular assembly of stylish, alternative Portland nightlife—people none of them felt at home with. Velvet Elvises mixed with local artists and black lights on the walls.

  Erik ordered two pieces of pie, Tree a grilled-cheese sandwich, and Thom complicated things with eggs without cheese, no toast, and Italian sausage that he felt guilty ordering in front of the vegetarian-looking waitress. Beers were had all around.

  “So, dreamboy, what are you going to do now?” Erik said. “Dream this one too?”

  “I did have . . . I’ve had a lot of dreams with water lately. Sort of thought it was one of those.”

  “Oh, you did, did you? Next time let’s have a little more warning. I woke up from dreaming that I was getting pissed on by a horse.”

  Thom chuckled and noticed the bar was playing his ex-girlfriend’s favorite band, Neutral Milk Hotel. Oh comely, I will be with you when you lose your breath. A tingle went up his spine.

  Erik lurched up and over to a group on their last drinks of the night. He came back with a lit cigarette.

  “Yep,” he said, “yep yep yep.” Exhaling smoke. “It was pretty funny though. You’ve all got to admit that it was pretty funny. Tree’s swan dive. The whole thing like a SeaWorld exhibition.”

  “Yeah,” said Thom, “it’d be funnier if I wasn’t so entirely screwed. Maybe I’ll go live with my mom.”

  “Hey, at least you can,” Erik said. “My folks are probably lost in a jungle somewhere. Home-home has been gone for decades.”

  “Yeah,” Tree said.

  “Yeah what?” said Erik, covering Tree in smoke, waving it away.

  “Mine too. Not a . . . err, not a jungle, but same sort of thing.”

  Erik exhaled another cloud of smoke in a sine wave, nodding vigorously. “We could always get arrested.” His white teeth picked up the glow of a black light somewhere. “It’s better than the rain.”

  “I think we . . .” Tree started and then looked down at the table, fingered the saltshaker. He grabbed the pepper and made the two spices do a self-conscious jig.

  Erik and Thom exchanged looks.

  “Not more of that dream shit. That’s freaky shit,” Erik said.

  “It’s not so freaky,” Thom said. “The mind is an interesting entity. The dreams may be subconscious wishes, snatches of extrapolated information that seem like premonition. Jung even talked about tapping into a collective mind—so he may have lifted the fifty-eight from your mind, or it may have been a lucky guess. But the important thing I think is not to get too carried away.”

  Tree nodded vigorously, Erik jabbed the cigarette into the ashtray with repetitive violence, and their food arrived.

  “Well, I’d like to hear it, dammit,” Erik said.

  “I wasn’t saying I didn’t want to hear,” Thom said.

  “No, you said you weren’t going to believe it.”

  “I didn’t,” Thom protested.

  “Well what the hell do you think you said? And shit, if he can pick a number out of my mind while I’m sleeping—how about that guy over there?” Erik pointed to an older man nursing his coffee, a ski cap tight around his ears. “What’s that guy thinking?”

  “I can’t,” said Tree, and his face reddened. “It doesn’t . . . I don’t . . .”

  “He’s thinking he’d like to get the waitress naked,” Thom said with too much on his fork, trying to pare down the load. “Just like the rest of us who are too afraid to admit it.”

  “That’s the spirit!” Erik took a swig of his beer. “That’s exactly right. He’s thinking he’d like a pair. See those greedy eyes? That one sitting up there”—he gestured with the bottle to a woman dressed as a goth, black tights on slender legs, beautiful lips with dark lipstick—“and the waitress.”

  Thom and Tree shyly studied the goth.

 
; “Heh heh,” Thom said, an ache in his throat. Thom’s brain repeated his mantra: She is pretty; I am homely.

  They looked at their plates, pushing around food they were too exhausted to eat.

  Thom grabbed a handful of his hair and squeezed, felt several of the strands pop from their roots. “What in the hell are we going to do? How can so many things possibly fail at once?” He tried to put a humorous tone on his words but knew he couldn’t keep it up. He was this far away from real depression, the state that puts you in bed for a couple of weeks, too weak to move.

  “Hey, big guy, none of that. No despair at this table. Tree’s got it all worked out.” Erik nudged Tree.

  “Uh!” Tree rubbed his side where Erik had elbowed him. “I don’t, really, I just think that . . . maybe something else might come up. Maybe we’ll eat some foreign food.”

  “What in the Jesus hell are you talking about? What kind of a plan is that? We’re trying to cheer Thom up. Come on now, foreign food—we’re heading to a Thai restaurant next? Listen, this is how you do it. I’ve got an uncle that lives in one of those fancy houses in the hills, great place, there’s a hot tub, it’ll be warm and dry, big improvement right there. He’s away in Europe for three months, and I know where the spare key is. Fantastic kitchen, view of the city, we’ll get girlfriends and have them over, it’s a hell of a place. Just to get back on our feet. You’ll get your job, Thom, and then whatever happens, happens.”

  “Really?” Thom smiled dreamily. “We could do that?”

  Erik rolled his eyes. “No, man, come on, think I’d have been staying in that apartment if I had a place like that? I was just showing Tree how to cheer somebody up.”

  “You sonofabitch.”