Sherwood Nation: a novel

by Benjamin Parzybok

  “Sorry, sorry about that—this is what’s going to happen. The water will have made the apartment pretty much unlivable. The landlord will tell us to get our shit and get out, because it’s got a lot of repair time and they’ve got to check electrical and structural and all hell, and while they’re at it, why not just renovate the damn thing so it gets more rent?”

  Thom put his face in his hands and stared between fingers at his Italian sausage.

  “We’re going on a trip,” Tree said.

  “You dreamed this?” Thom said.

  “Hey, man”—Erik pointing at Thom—“don’t knock dreamboy, I told you he had a plan.”

  “But I’m not sure. Sometimes they don’t . . .” Tree stared at his plate.

  “Quit saying that! So your dreams don’t always come true. Mine don’t come true. Yours come true, Thom?”

  “Not a one.”

  Erik brought his beer bottle down to the table with a heavy thud, “That settles it then. We leave tomorrow.”

  “You have got to be out of your mind. Where to, what money, why?” Thom said.

  “Come on, you big worrywart, what have you got going here?” Erik said.

  Thom looked hopelessly at Tree.

  “I don’t have anything going,” Tree volunteered. “But we could find another apartment.”

  Erik spread his hands wide in mock indignation. “Just a minute ago you were talking about a trip. Besides. Who is going to rent to three unemployed types?”

  “I have some money from my grandfather,” Tree said.

  Erik nodded several times. “How much?”

  “Erik,” Thom growled.

  “Hey, it’s cool, man. Don’t tell me. I was just asking.”

  “Fifteen hundred.”

  Erik calculated on the ceiling for a moment and then mashed the remains of his second piece of pie into a liquidy hash with his fork. “Well, that’s an extremely short apartment rental or a long trip.”

  “I’m going to live with my mom,” Thom said.

  “Where’s that?”

  “Central Washington.”

  “The hell are you going to do there? I say we just get in my car and head south, seek our futures in less rainy climes. Go to Mexico. Think about fifteen hundred bucks in Mexico. Viva México!” he yelled, fork in the air. Heads at several tables turned toward Erik then back again.

  Tree shifted uneasily in his seat.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Thom said. “I want to look at the apartment again.”

  When they hit fresh air, Thom decided all at once he wanted the trip. He wanted to get out of town, do something different, see somewhere different. He needed to move, to ramble, to let road dust and sky patch tight the various holes in his life. “I’ll do the trip,” he said.

  “Yes!” said Erik. “We’ve got a plan. You’re in, right Tree?”

  “Okay,” Tree nodded and smiled.

  “Okay!” Erik started the car, revved it, and, with a whoosh of smoke and a bang, it gave out and would not start again.

  Thom clapped his hands in glee. “I’m cursed. Let’s all of us just coast this thing into the Willamette River. Us in it.”

  Erik pounded on the steering wheel.

  “Tell me about your uncle again,” Tree said.

  With nowhere else to go and no other way to get there—the buses wouldn’t start for several hours—they walked. Down Clinton Street to Twelfth, two miles, down Twelfth to Burnside, three miles. On Burnside a car brimming with party revelers pummeled them with fast-food remains. A milkshake struck Thom square in the chest, exploding onto Tree and Erik in a chocolatey mess. Erik turned and ran after the car, holding his middle finger up and shouting incomprehensibly. He made it a full two blocks before he ran out of steam. Thom and Tree waited, scooping off globs of milkshake.

  Burnside to the river, over the bridge and the frigid glare of the Willamette River, the Superfund ecodisaster. Thom imagined the slick, rubbery bodies of suicides floating coldly under the bridge, merging into the Columbia and then finally out to sea.

  They continued up through downtown and then up to Twenty-Third, three miles.

  By the time they got home, they were exhausted. A note from the building manager was taped to their door. Hi Tree, heard about the leak. Will have a look in the morn.—Bob. As if they’d had a small issue with a leaky toilet and he’d be around to fix it when he got the chance.

  Erik checked the couch and was amazed to find it dry. “Feel it! It’s dry. Think all the water soaked in?” Both roommates dutifully felt the couch.

  “There’s something about this couch,” Tree said.

  Thom sighed. “I’m going to bed wherever I can.”

  “What’s about this couch is it’s where I’m going to sleep, that’s what’s about this couch,” Erik said. The others curled into dry corners of the apartment wherever they could find them, with clothes and scavenged dry blankets piled over them for warmth. The sound of dripping echoed through the apartment like a cave lullaby.

  The apartment manager was at their door first thing in the morning with an older, well-dressed gentleman in tow.

  The knocking came to Erik like announcements in foreign countries. Like undersea drums, leagues away. He couldn’t seem to separate the sound from his dreams, and even on his feet he was unsure which part of the wrecked room the noise was coming from. He found the door, forced it open enough to look out, and the two men on the other side took a half step back. A smell of must and rot bustled past them and filled the hallway.

  “Fue una noche terrible, bien mojada,” Erik said, and felt his voice didn’t sound right. His hair stood out at angles like the sweeping end of an abused broom.

  “What?” said the gentleman.

  The manager glanced at the other man, swallowed and said, “Qué pasó?”

  “I speak English,” Erik said, confused and irritated.

  “What happened?” the manager said.

  “You were speaking Spanish,” Erik said, ready to close the door.

  “In the night, what happened in the night?”

  “Oh. Waterbed upstairs.”

  “But how about with your apartment?”

  “Ever seen Titanic?” Erik asked.

  They both nodded, and Erik stared at them until he realized they wanted to come in. He wrenched at the door, then went to take a piss. When he got back, all that was left of the men was a scattering of fading shoeprints in the wet rug. One set of shoes had spent a fair amount of time at the couch, he noticed, and then Erik folded himself back into it and back to sleep.

  Tree woke to the smell. It smelled like a house on the commune when a cat had died in the basement and lay undiscovered for a week. He ran to the bathroom and lost the remnants of the grilled cheese sandwich from the night before.

  He found Thom and Erik in the kitchen, drinking coffee from paper cups. Thom handed him a cup.

  “Electricity is off,” Thom said. “They’re worried about fire danger and other problems. It’s all old knob-and-tube wiring through here. So we went out and got coffee.”

  “Thanks,” said Tree. He took a sip and let it wash down the terrible taste in his mouth. “I threw up,” he said. “That smell is terrible.”

  Thom nodded. “Erik says he can’t smell it.”

  Erik shrugged.

  They drank their coffee and watched the rain through the kitchen window. The apartment was cold and uncomfortable, and Thom filed through his life looking for bright spots.

  “Boy, that was a fun night.” Thom raised his cup in a mock toast.

  Tree got a pair of needle-nose pliers from a kitchen drawer and began to dismantle the small wire house that he’d made and set on the kitchen table in a spirit of home.

  “I think we�
��re going on a trip,” Thom said.

  “Not you too,” Erik said. “Why aren’t I having these dreams?”

  “No dream,” Thom said. “I just think we should get out of here.”

  “I have eighteen dollars to my name,” Erik said in what both roommates felt was an uncharacteristic moment of truth. “And you know where my fucking car is.”

  “You’re a realist today,” Thom said. “It doesn’t really become you.”

  “Well, I don’t think you can even take the Greyhound anywhere for eighteen bucks. Maybe Salem or something, but I’m talking about getting out of here.”

  “I’ve got a couple of hundred,” Thom said.

  “You guys know how much I have.” Tree’s disassembled house quickly morphed into a bus shape under his pliers. “I’m in.” He paused and looked up at them. “I can front you.”

  But why? Thom wondered. We don’t even really know each other. A faint paranoia coursed through him. There was a knock, and Tree went to get the door.

  It was the building manager, his hair tied up in a ponytail. He wore a Grateful Dead shirt, slacks, and work boots, and took a step back when the smell hit him.

  “Hey, Tree,” he said fondly. He worried his lip with his teeth, raised his eyebrows. “That’s quite a smell.”

  “The rug, I guess.”

  “Ah, it’ll have to go.” He exhaled dramatically and put his hands on his hips. “So I’ve got bad news for you guys.”

  “We’ve got to move out?” Erik said.

  “Everything has got to go. We’re going to overhaul the three apartments entirely.” They nodded and stared at the floor. “I’m sorry about that, guys. Here’s your deposit back, Tree.” He handed Tree an envelope.

  “The couch was here when I moved in,” said Tree.

  The manager studied the couch through the opening in the doorway, “I know,” he said. “It’s funny. This morning the owner said to make sure you take the couch with you. Not sure why he would say that. I can have the workmen chuck it for you, though, if you don’t want it. Or better yet, you guys could just haul it over to the Goodwill. It’s only two blocks away. That might be easier, if you don’t mind—I’d probably have to charge you otherwise.”

  “It is a nice couch,” said Thom, thinking of the extent of his furniture. “The owner came by this morning?”

  “Yeah, we spoke with . . .” Pointing at Erik. “Sorry, I don’t know your names, just Tree since he’s on the lease. I’m Bob.”

  Erik and Thom introduced themselves.

  “This morning?” said Thom.

  “Yeah, we knocked at about eight a.m.”

  Tree and Thom stared at Erik, who wore his eyebrow-raised, open-eyed look.

  “Okay,” said Tree.

  “I’m really sorry,” Bob said. “There’s just nothing really to be done about it.”

  Thom nodded.

  “You could let us take a couple of swings at the people upstairs,” Erik said.

  “You’ve got to wait in line for that, my friend.”

  They busied themselves with undoing what they’d done just a week before. Packing clothes, this time divvying up what could be taken on a trip and setting the rest aside to be donated, thrown away, and forgotten.

  There was not much to pack. Tree had his wire and pliers, the Bible he’d never opened, some slightly damp dream journals, a change of clothes. Fetching a knife from the kitchen, he opened the Bible and cut carefully along its spine, separating the Old Testament from the New. He packed the Old. With a deep sigh, he threw his entire sculpture collection in a box, and the box in the dumpster.

  The fact that every several years or so Erik lost everything he owned kept his possessions to a minimum. He had extensive personal hygiene equipment, a few shirts, and several hats, one of which was straw. He took off his shirt and put his straw hat on and did some maneuvers in front of a mirror. He had a fake beard, which he’d never used but always liked the idea of using. He threw it all in a pillowcase and busied himself with eating whatever was left in the refrigerator and cupboards, which included a Jell-O mix that he ate by the spoonful. The sickness that followed he tried to chase away by eating half a block of cheese.

  Thom spent the first thirty minutes inventorying his computer gadgetry, packing it, taking it out, and putting it in the Goodwill pile, feeling heartbroken, and then packing it again. It was a nice laptop, if a bit old, he admitted, going over its curves. All of his projects were uploaded to a server, so he could access them from anywhere. But still, the laptop was a connection to a whole people, to a different people, his people. Most of his friends he’d never met in the flesh, though he would never admit this publicly, especially not to Erik or Tree. His virtual, fleshless relationships were the domain of the ultranerdy, the hopelessly introverted and socially maladjusted, especially in the absence of real relationships. If his mother knew the level to which he had sunk, she would weep. A Brazilian expert on TCP/IP protocols, a German and an Israeli working on PHP stuff, a Taiwanese and Chinese guy who were working on rival open-source databases, a Japanese Objective-C guy, a girl in Vermont who specialized in information design, several South American Apache-server people, a scattering of Americans and Canadians. They weren’t friend friends. He knew little to nothing about their lives. But they were friends, and he loved them deeply. They didn’t talk about much but their area of specialty, and they all seemed to utilize a wry banter that acknowledged that they knew where they stood in their own societies, which team they were on. A few of them had become filthy rich, but mostly they were people with unmatchable attention spans, people who could spend fifteen hours a day for weeks in front of a computer working on a murky, obscure problem that would most likely never be appreciated except by a tiny handful of people in their world. Most of them had shitty jobs working for companies that didn’t understand them. They were close to the machine. They thought with steadfast logical minds and occasional explosive bouts of creativity that, at times, would reengineer the way machines interacted with humans or the way machines interacted with other machines.

  The phone rang, and Thom heard Erik say: “Stop calling. We’re leaving, you molester-bastard-pervert-cocksucker.”

  “Don’t tell them we’re leaving,” Tree said belatedly from down the hall.

  Thom shut his door. He decided to take the laptop. With it he threw in his cheap digital camera, a radio modem, and a couple of changes of clothes that he carefully folded and packed around the equipment in a backpack. He decided to send his pots and pans, desk, and whatever else to the Goodwill. He thought his life was changing; it must be changing. Fate had certainly cleared out any holds he’d had on life here.

  Then in the living room he ran into his books. With an ache in his throat, Thom went through his entire sodden collection, water still an inch deep at the bottom of the box. Bloated and falling apart, their glues melted, covers warped. He pulled out a reprint of Independent People by Halldór Laxness, and the sheep on the cover came off, stuck to his thumb. The pages of Haruki Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance were oatmeal, indistinguishable from each other. And a book apiece by Rick Moody, E. Annie Proulx, and Richard Powers respectively had become like Siamese triplets, the whole inseparable without fatally damaging each of its parts. All of them doomed to the Dumpster.

  The couch was surprisingly light. Erik and Thom each carried an end and Tree ran around opening doors, making sure they angled it down the stairs properly. Thom wished he had a place to store it. He briefly thought of his ex-girlfriend’s basement and then wished he hadn’t.

  Both Erik and Thom were aware of being out in daylight, in public view for the first time in a while. Here they were, announcing they were leaving. They were taking the symbol of sedentary life and getting rid of it. They were off. They felt exultant.

  They carried the couch the two blocks down Bu
rnside and realized they were something to look at. Three men and a couch at a stoplight. Several people waved and they smiled in return.

  They came to the Goodwill parking lot and carried the couch to the garage-style entrance, the weight of it beginning to pull on them.

  The man in charge of donations was in his late sixties and dressed in blue jeans and a blue sweatshirt. His face was lined and grim, and his nose projected from his face like a geometry problem gone awry. He came and stood over the couch, fingered the back of it for a while.

  “I can’t take this,” he said. He tapped it with his shoe and inspected the stitching, picked up one end and measured the heft. “No, sir, I can’t take it.” He adjusted his baseball cap, revealing well-groomed gray and black hair.

  “Can’t take it?” Thom looked over at the wall of donations and saw a mound of couches in far rattier condition than theirs.

  “Can’t take it.”

  “Why on earth not?” Thom said.

  “It’s not a brand-name couch.”

  “It’s a handmade couch,” Thom said. “Don’t they sell?”

  “Yes, but this one won’t.”

  Tree nodded. “There’s something about this couch.”

  The older man nodded with him. “Yes, there is,” he said.

  “What are you guys talking about? It’s a perfectly nice couch.” Thom waved one arm up and down and tried to tamp down the confusion. “If we weren’t leaving, I’d keep it. What’s wrong with it?”

  “Do I know you from somewhere?” Erik said.

  The man squinted his eyes at Erik and then shook his head decisively.

  “Hmm,” Erik said. He rubbed his middle finger over the scrub of a newly shaved mustache. “Okay, okay.” He looked at Thom and Tree. “Well, this is no setback, guys. We’ll just dump it in your dumpster there.” He pointed to a giant Dumpster on the edge of the parking lot.