Sherwood Nation: a novel Read online

  Table of Contents

  Preface

  The Drought

  The Riot

  The Nation

  The Beginning

  The Trouble

  End Times

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise for Benjamin Parzybok’s debut novel Couch

  An Excerpt from Benjamin Parzybok’s novel Couch

  Chapter 1: The Couch

  Also Available from Small Beer Press:

  Sherwood

  Nation

  a novel by

  Benjamin Parzybok

  Small Beer Press

  Easthampton, MA

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are either fictitious or used fictitiously.

  Sherwood Nation copyright © 2014 by Benjamin Parzybok. All rights reserved.

  www.levinofearth.com

  Small Beer Press

  150 Pleasant Street #306

  Easthampton, MA 01027

  smallbeerpress.com

  weightlessbooks.com

  [email protected]

  Distributed to the trade by Consortium.

  Parzybok, Benjamin, author.

  Sherwood Nation / Benjamin Parzybok.

  pages cm

  Summary: “In Portland, Oregon, water rations are down to one gallon per person per day. Even as water is declared a communal right, hoarding and riots persist. A young water activist nicknamed Maid Marian rides her swelling popularity in opposition to the city government and becomes an icon to a city in need. Even as she and her compatriots build a new community, they make powerful enemies in the city government and the National Guard. Their idealistic dream is quickly caught up in a brutal fight for survival. This is a love story, a war story, a grand social experiment, a treatise on government, on freedom and necessity, on individualism and community”-- Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-61873-086-2 (paperback) -- ISBN 978-1-61873-087-9 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS3616.A788S54 2014

  813’.6--dc23

  2014018642

  First Edition 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

  Text set in 11 pt Minion.

  Paper edition printed on 30% PCR recycled 50# Natures Natural paper by the Maple Press in York, PA.

  Cover art by Andi Watson (andiwatson.info).

  Preface

  How it happened:

  It happened slowly. The fishermen called the rogue and unpredictable changes at sea El Pescadero. Winds came from differing directions, currents looped back on themselves, temperatures fluctuated. It wasn’t seasonal like El Niño, though at first everyone thought it was. It didn’t go away. Governments fought bitterly about whose fault was whose, and who ought to do what about it.

  Along with El Pescadero came an increase in oceanic salinity. There were lots of theories there. When you swam in the ocean, the new buoyancy was subtle, but pleasurable.

  The bone-dry summers of the west lingered deeper and deeper into winter. Everyone could see that the snow pack was melting. When was the snow pack not melting? All you had to do was look up at any of the balding mountains.

  Then the great Deschutes River, elegant and fast, a river which cut across the Oregon desert like a streak of lightning across a dull gray sky, dried up in a single summer.

  The farms that depended upon it followed suit. There were strikes and protests. Blood was spilled. Then, quickly, other rivers diminished.

  Finally, the greatest of them all, the Columbia River, its sources choked in mud, leaked its deathsong through the gorge, and became only a scaly alligator skin of memory. In its wake, valleys turned to deserts, fertile farms to dust, and the great migration East began.

  As the hordes of Droudies poured into the Midwest and Eastern United States and the last of the surface water seeped deep into the ground, anger over the millions of incoming refugees escalated. Finally, borders along the Rocky Mountains were sealed to Westerners and a meager aid strategy was conceived by the bankrupt government for the many millions abandoned to their dry fates out west.

  The Drought

  It was morning and the power was not yet on. Zach and Renee lay in the heat of the bed listening to the city wake outside the building’s windows.

  “We should learn how to rain-dance,” Renee said. They were new to the relationship, and she could feel his hesitance to speak, the tentativeness to him, as if she were some toothy, unpredictable animal he’d invited into his house. She pressed her lips into his shoulder and wanted to bite him there. His skin left a taste of salt on her lips.

  “Why don’t you?” Zach said.

  “Nah.”

  Zach stared at the ceiling, and she stared at him, with his short-cropped head and monkish demeanor, as if he lived his life in servitude to some greater thing, the identity of which she had yet to figure out. “I’m thinking of turning to crime instead.”

  “You’d be good at it,” he said. He was never sure how serious she was. He made two pistols of his hands and pow-powed the ceiling. “But you’d need a mask and a horse, obviously.”

  “Mm, spurs.”

  An eerie clop clop clop sounded through the open window and they looked at each other in amazement.

  “A horse!” she said. “You’re a conjurer!”

  But instead it was a big moose that stumbled along the dusty street, its skin tight over its ribs. Its head jerked left and right in anxious, almost animatronic movements.

  “Oh no,” Renee said, “I fucking hate this. Josh saw a bear two days ago—I told you?”

  They watched it continue down the street until a shot rang out. The moose’s body jerked and sidestepped strangely and then there was another shot.

  “That’s a whole shit ton of extra food rations if they can store it,” Zach said as they watched men close in on it. “God knows how they’ll store it.” The moose stumbled again on a third shot but continued on. “They’ve got to get a straight shot in.”

  “I can’t watch,” Renee said. She climbed back in bed and spoke to Zach’s shirtless back as he watched the moose fall and the hunters try to drag the animal to the side of the road. “Hunters in the streets.”

  “Dying of thirst has got to be worse,” Zach said.

  “What’s happening? Tell me what’s happening.”

  “They can’t lift it, one of its legs is kicking.”

  “My coworker had to kill his dog,” Zach said. He’s a total mess about it.”

  “Seriously? No.”

  “He was a big dog. He drank over twenty units a day and was getting aggressive about his share.”

  “I don’t buy it,” Renee said. “The moose maybe, but not your own dog. Next is your neighbor, then your children and your wife. It’s like a spider that cuts her own webbing.”

  “You think I’m in danger, as his coworker?”

  “Oh, you’re in danger alright.”

  Zach turned and looked at her and she winked at him. She was naked with the sheet pulled to the top of her thighs. She had unraveled her braids for him the night before, and her hair spilled across her arms and his pillow.

  “You’re not watching anymore?” she said.

  “No.” He pulled his gallon off the dresser and poured them each a unit, a little less than half a cup. He handed her one and sat on the edge of the bed, placing one hand on her thigh, the heat of it warming his hand through the sheet.
He stared into the shallow cup of water and thought of the moose’s stutter-step as it was shot, and wondered if he would know when he was the moose—the animal too lost and thirsty for reason, stumbling toward annihilation.

  He was still thirsty after he’d finished. Renee stared into her cup as if awaiting a divination there. It was an effort not to refill his. Rations were two unit gallons per day. His measure of making it: if at the end of the day he had a few units of savings leftover.

  He watched her sit up in bed. She divvied her hair into two halves and proceeded to rework each half into long, black braids. He was so taken with her. He wished the job of braiding would never end, so he could keep on watching.

  “Come back in here,” she said when she’d finished.

  “I’ve got to work,” he said, but made no movement toward it. He was one of the few people he knew who had a job.

  “Nah. When the power goes on, we can pretend then. We can go about the day. Until then, let’s be here.”

  He stood over the bed indecisively for a moment until she got a crab-claw hold on his wrist and pulled him back in. There was a struggle with the sheet as she worked at getting it flattened out and repositioned over them just so and he held still and grinned as she worried it. When it was finally to her liking, they lay side by side, the sheet pulled to their chins, and were quiet.

  He found her hand under the covers. Next to him was the girl who’d served him coffee at the café down the block for over a year, the one he’d thought about at work, at night, in bed. The one he never got it together enough to approach for more than a cup of coffee. The girl he’d listened to as she talked to customers, weaving in eloquent yarns that inevitably turned to history: the collapse of the Bronze Age, the Mongol empire, the Polish peasant revolt, the Mayan uprising against the Spanish, and with each story he overheard he felt himself able to say less to her, his tongue tangled with awe.

  Then two weeks ago the café was shut down and she walked home with him on her last day. At his door, he’d said, “I’d like it if you’d come inside.” He still winced at the blunt, sad honesty of the line. She’d smiled as if it were really that easy and said sure.

  She unfolded the corner of the sheet and reached to the bedside table next to her. “I have wet wipes!” she said. She handed him one and took one for herself. Then she submerged under the sheet with it, and he could feel the wet, cleansing and titillating trail she made with it down his chest, and then further. He reached for any part of her, first the back of her neck, then her arm, later her thigh when that surfaced from under the sheet, and then between.

  When they finished she squeezed his hand tight and they were silent. After a while she said, “We’re going to do a robbery. Josh and I and a couple others.”

  “Black Bloc Josh? From the rezoning riot?” he said. He let go of her hand and crossed his arms over his chest. Josh had been a regular at the café, who with a few others had held regular meetings in which they bitched overmuch about the state of the world, with no small amount of bravado. He sat near them once, listening in, watching Renee among the group. They all seemed hardened. Two men and two women, dirty and browned by sun, lean and fierce-looking. In his mind they were like a tribe of warriors; the men were real men and next to them, Zach felt like a boy. He wasn’t sure what they’d been before: wilderness guides maybe, or labor organizers, or electricians. They certainly hadn’t been ad writers. If he were to be honest, he realized he’d hoped never to hear of them again.

  “A truck,” she said. “We won’t take a lot—it’s a message.”

  “Renee—please.” He turned and propped himself up on one elbow. “A message?” It was hard to keep the disdain out of his voice.

  “It’s not an official distribution truck. They’re driving them up into the West Hills and we followed one. We want people to know what they’re doing.”

  “I can help you guys send a message. Patel & Grummus is the city’s ad firm. I talk to the mayor all the time.”

  Renee shrugged and smiled and then pulled him to her. “Don’t worry, Zach.”

  With his lips pressed against her neck, their bodies fitting together like two hands clasped, he did just that: worry.

  At the doorway to his building, she kissed him goodbye. It was an easy thing, a simple thing. Like husband and wife do, each headed off for their jobs. Him to his, her to the meeting of the water activists.

  “Listen, don’t,” Zach said once more.

  “I’ll bring you a gallon,” she said.

  “I don’t care about that.”

  She smiled roguishly and patted his cheek. “Don’t you worry about me. I’m invincible,” she said and flexed her bicep for him. “Go ahead, feel it.”

  He did so and nodded glumly. “Impressive. Back in one piece,” he said, “or else.”

  On her bike, though, she felt vulnerable. She rode hard to her apartment. The streets had begun to be unpredictable—moose, yes, but the desperation had led to a steady uptick of violence. She asked herself if she were really going to go through with this, and each time some inner voice, of some stronger substance, piped up that she was.

  A few weeks previously she and Josh had tailed the trucks heading into the wealthy West Hills neighborhood. They’d watched as the trucks pulled into the driveways of palatial houses. Drivers hand-delivering gallon after gallon of water. Inside, she’d imagined an opulent matron bathing in a fountain. The image of it needled her for days.

  Nearly a year ago, when the tap dried up and water service ceased, the city council created the Portland Water Act, declaring water to be a city-owned resource of which every citizen would get equal distribution. But as far as she could tell, while the rich swam in their fountains, kids in Northeast Portland wandered about in a dehydrated daze, the last of the city’s trees died, and moose committed suicide.

  Bea was asleep. She edged her roommate’s door open and stared in, trying to decide whether to tell her where she was going. Bea looked peaceful in sleep, issuing a soft snore, a sort of gorilla-hum. Her brownish-red hair curled in a knotted mass around her face and her big feet hung over the end of the bed, uncovered. Though it was warm enough, Renee slipped in and quietly tucked the sheet over them.

  In her room Renee sat on her bed and rotated her metal unit gallon in her hands, letting the water slosh about inside. She had a little time to kill, but it was the sort of time that could not be used. Time that sent an incapaciting buzz through one’s brain, keeping her from performing simple tasks. There was less than a quart left in the container. She took a swig and then confirmed the amount on the digital readout: 6.4 units remained, out of the forty. The city issued the unit gallons, which measured a gallon into forty smaller units, under the premise: That which is measured, improves. The expression was affixed to the side via a cheerful green sticker, with a tired-looking smiley face at the end of it. She felt she remembered Zach had had a hand in the campaign.

  She wished she could tell her parents. But even if she could find a way to get a call through to the other side of the Rocky Mountains, to whatever humble abode they might be residing in, eking out some living or scraping by on savings in order to buy their daily allotment of alcohol, she thought she knew exactly how the conversation might go:

  “Hi Mom, it’s Renee.”

  “Oh!” There would be the sound of a long exhale of smoke, as if her mother had inhaled a dragon’s lungful of tobacco before answering the phone. “Renee.”

  A silence would persist for a few seconds as both considered what they might have to tell each other.

  “I went to a water activists meeting, really cool people. We’re going to do an action today to make a statement about water issues. I’m going to help stop a contraband truck.”

  “What?” her mother would say, the English deeply accented by her native Spanish. “What about your degree?”
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br />   Her mother always brought up her degree, as if it were a panacea for everything that irked her about her daughter’s personality. Renee was the only one in the family to receive one. But to her mother’s horror, she’d graduated with a degree in history, or as she’d once called it: a degree in the dead.

  Then, as she tried to make the water activists sound compelling for her mother, the words would get a little lost in her mouth. The making of her own life interesting to her mother was a task she’d had very little luck with throughout her childhood. The more she explained, the more preposterous it would sound. A noise or two might issue from her mother, indicating her continued, but mostly bored, presence on the end of the line. Renee could see her: in her gray sweatsuit, the phone squeezed between her shoulder and ear, a glass of gin in one hand while with the other she pried off chips of paint from the wall with a long thumbnail. In the background, the dramatic monotony of Mexican telenovelas. And then her mother would say, by way of ending the conversation: Your father will want to know.

  Her father, Renee thought, would want to know. She would love to tell him, but there was the difficulty of encountering him in a moment of coherence. When Renee’s mother yelled for her father, down several flights of stairs, he would pick up his phone off the table saw, where it sat in a pile of sawdust and red wine splatter. Her parents undertook their lives on different floors of the house, him in the basement, her on the second floor, each speaking their own accents, Mexican and Polish, each living partly in the worlds from which they’d come, meeting only rarely in the middle for meals or to exit the house, or most rarely of all, when a sudden berserk passion flared up between them. Around her father were hundreds of dark, metal-worn tools, the signs of a constant, if somewhat ineffectual, tinkerer. In polar opposition to the woman two floors above, he would answer boisterously, sounding thrilled to hear from her, his words slushing from his mouth with great speed, sentences released in one order and then swallowed back and thrust out in a different order. He would listen to her deeply for a minute or two, then list back to her the details, asking questions that she’d answered, as if the conversation were going in reverse. It would make him happy, and then angry on her behalf, and then happy all over again, and then, inevitably, he would gather himself up, swell his lungs for delivery of a monstrous speech about his own comparable moment.