Sherwood Nation Read online

  When she woke it was dark, and her roommate Bea was there with a washcloth and hydrogen peroxide.

  “Jesus Christ, Renee, I saw the news.” Her roommate dabbed her face with swift, overly hard strokes.

  “Ow—easy. What happened?”

  “You happened, dude. We’ve got to go right now. Right now.” Bea pulled her up by her armpits, as if she were a child, so that she wobbled unsteadily next to Bea, a head taller than she was.

  “Bea.”

  “Right now.” Bea pointed at the door. “They’re calling you Maid motherfucking Marian.”

  “What?” Renee said, losing her balance.

  Bea pushed her out the front door, across the dead dust-lawn, and down onto the bench seat of her ’76 Dodge Dart. She slammed the door. “Stay down, for fuck sake, stay down, we’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Who is calling me?”

  “The news, asshole, you and your people are already on the news. They’re calling you Maid Marian.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” The seat bench felt like a heap of granite. With each sway or bounce in the car a searing pain went through her ribs.

  “You know. Robin Hood’s girlfriend? You made a spectacle out of yourself. Just like you to go and make yourself a hero, dumbass.”

  Renee grinned and tried to hold on.

  Nevel watched his slow, steady schedule with fascination, that of a working parent: the balance between trying to serve the mayor at work, a round with kids in the dust at the playground, the delicate chore of spousal relations, the upkeep of a home, the sustenance of life a dulling routine. The day divided into its major activities: Breakfast, Lunch, Nap Time, Dinner, Play Time, Bath, Bed—and then that sprawling chaos that enveloped his numbed mind after the kids went to bed when no one claimed his time but his own disorganized self, where, more often than not, after he’d kissed his wife good night, he found himself in the basement, chipping away at the wall there, digging deeper into the earth, building a tunnel for no particular reason that he could discern other than as a sort of military exercise against his anxiety.

  Nevel poured a rare bath for the kids. They were down to bathing once every week or two. He abhorred the thought of bathing them in corpse water, as they’d taken to calling the non-drinkable family extra rations, and so he filtered it by running it through a hand-pump water filter. It was a slow, tedious process. A fetid, rotting smell wafted through the bathroom window and he had to put his face to the water to make sure the smell did not come from there. He wondered if the neighbor had killed his dog and buried it too shallowly in his backyard.

  The kids scrabbled noisily up the stairs, one laughing and the other pseudo-crying for being left behind in the rush to get there. They crowded into the bathroom and he stripped them down, the dusty earthen child smell of a week’s worth of play overwhelming the smell of rot, and plopped each of them into their proprietary sections of the shallow bath. A chorus of complaint was aired over the temperature of the bath which he pretended not to hear. The day was still warm enough. In the winter there would be only sponges.

  The bath was pitifully shallow, but it was enough, and they happily played and splashed in it for nearly an hour. Water splattered out of the bath wastefully but he said nothing, wanting to give them, if only for a moment, a feeling of abundance in their lives. Their collective water ration didn’t go far; bathing meant something else wouldn’t get water. When their bath was finished, he would siphon the remaining water out to reuse for next week.

  His lips were dry and he worried about the drought a little and, more immediately, dreaded the escalation of conflict that would come when he removed them from the bath and struggled them through the drying, the donning of their pajamas, the brushing of teeth. There would be crying and there would be laughing and wrestling and someone’s feelings would get hurt and somebody would do something awful to someone else and then they’d read stories together followed by a half-dozen more rituals, teeth brushing and last-minute drinks of water—with each he would tamp down the conservation lecture they’d heard repeatedly.

  His wife, Cora, was down in the kitchen cleaning up after dinner, and this is what their nights were like. The division of labor. Divide and conquer.

  When the crying started Nevel thought seriously about getting up to go in.

  “Nevel?” Cora shouted up the stairs.

  “I’m on it,” he said and rolled off the bed. “OK, guys,” he said in the bathroom and the crying collectively increased a notch.

  It appeared to be an argument about toy boat rights and bath water boundaries and for a moment he thought about making an instructive analogy about the state of the world. Instead he put toothpaste on their toothbrushes, dipped each into a unit of pure water and inserted them into their mouths, which quieted the last of the complaint.

  Cora shouted up the stairs, “Make sure to help them brush their teeth” and he wondered how this could happen. How the trajectory that was his life, both of their lives, had leveled into this. “I’m on it,” he hollered down the stairs, trying to keep the annoyance at bay. “Doing it now!” he sang.

  Sure you are, Cora thought downstairs as she moistened a dish rag with the water she’d used to steam the imported broccoli which the children had refused to eat. She wiped down the plates but it was difficult to get the frying pan clean without letting it soak, and she stood there looking at it for a full minute trying to decide if she was going to use the water she had left to soak the pan or to water her last surviving house plant. She cried a little over the sink until she felt self-conscious and weak and poured half a unit of water into the pan and the other half into the plant. Later, she’d recycle the water from the pan.

  “There,” she said.

  The power was still on. The mayor was on the radio and Cora had the same reaction she always did to hearing his voice. How could Nevel work with him? That slick eloquence that turned her stomach, the constant bad news laced with his strange reasoning on how they should be happy to hear it. She thought he said rations were being cut to one gallon per person. Her face burned hot, aghast at the news, and she waited for the news anchor to confirm it. She didn’t know how they could survive this.

  “Nevel!” she yelled, but he didn’t answer. The radio had turned to a crime report of a woman on a bicycle who had robbed a private water truck and handed out water to people on the street. Fuck yes, she thought. She listened tensely as they talked about the manhunt. She had a moment of envy, wishing she was her. Or in her gang, a thief on a bicycle, and then she wondered if Thief on a Bicycle weren’t the name of an old movie. She walked to the base of the stairs and listened to the squabbles over who got to pump the water back out of the bathtub. “Hey, Nevel?”

  “What?” he yelled back, his tone that of a man who suspects he’s being told to do something he’s already doing.

  She said never mind and went back to the kitchen and swept the floor in a hurry. She didn’t know what she was going to say anyway. That rations were cut? That she’d had it, that she was going to go find a woman named Maid Marian and go outlaw? It was 7:25 p.m., and they had thirty-five minutes of power before the blackout.

  After story time, Jason asked what would happen if they ran out of water.

  “We won’t, Jay—we’ll be fine,” Nevel said.

  “But what will happen if we’re not fine?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, maybe we’ll go on a killing rampage until we find more water, and if we don’t, we’ll drink blood. Garrr!” Nevel bared his teeth and turned toward his daughter who screamed and giggled and flailed away.

  “You kids with me or what?” He rose and thrust his fists into the air and it felt great.

  “Yeah!” Jason said. “Yeah!” He scrambled out of the covers and stood on top of his bed.

  “No. Stop. Dad’s teasing. Back in bed, everybody.” Cora said. “We’d probably pick up and move. The drought isn’t as bad in Spokane, and we have family there.”

  “Is that w
here Calden moved?”

  “Calden moved to Alaska. They still have a little snow in the mountains there.”

  Afterwards Nevel and Cora hugged in the hallway in the dark. The house was quiet with the whir of everything that whirred gone dead. The streetlights were all somber flagpoles now.

  Cora held onto the news about the new rations, and a sickening hollow stuck in her chest. He’d been funny with the kids at story time, and adept, and she didn’t want to leach any poison from the world outside the house into him just yet. He could spend the rest of the night wrapped in anxiety or he could spend it in his tunnel, so she decided to spare him what he’d learn at work tomorrow anyway.

  They kissed, but each was already leaning toward the activities they’d set aside for themselves for the night. That which let the mind ease into solitude and quiet, the antithesis of child-rearing. She would read by candlelight, he would dig. Were it to happen, this would be the moment that passion took hold. He pressed into her subtly, experimentally. But when she patted his flank with a beat of closure his mind quickly moved on.

  They went their separate ways, into the hermitage of their projects.

  Nevel paced about the kitchen looking for any last chores so as not to make his descent seem overly eager, and then he opened the door and padded quietly down into the darkness and felt his way across the cement floor to his hole.

  The hole was a reminder of his small cache of water and thus a reminder of his omnipresent thirst. The bottles glistened in the light of the flashlight down a branch of the tunnel. What water he could stand to spare from his daily routine was squirreled away down here. He had to trust the city—what choice did he have? He had a family. He had to trust and be steady until that time when he could no longer trust and then he must radically and decisively change direction to protect his family.

  He was driven by hazy yearnings that bubbled up inside of him, unaware of their origins or meanings, and thus he dug, as if somewhere deep in the earth was concealed a clearer picture of himself. He patted the tunnel supports on his way to the end of the tunnel, listening for give or weakness. Then he moved to the back of the cave and tapped away at the clay and rock there, peeling back layers of time with each loosed rock.

  He swung the pickaxe into the wall of earth, knowing that several floors up his children, were they awake, would hear only the faintest tink tink tink, as if a man were slowly hollowing out his prison passageway. A section of the wall gave way and buried him up to his knees and he yelled out. His hands shook, and he searched about for the bottles to make sure they were sound.

  When the dust settled he tentatively freed himself from the rubble and sat atop with his head in his hands. What a stupid way to die. He wanted to believe he would sense this kind of danger. Especially now, as a parent, he felt a prescience of future disaster ought to be his right, a special power granted to all fathers. He stood and placed his forehead against the very back end of the cave. Felt the coolness of it and thought about how down here there was a safety and quietude. He’d begun to fantasize about burial here, about a sudden collapse of the cave that would leave him disappeared from the struggle to maintain, from the thirst. From his children and wife and the fumes of traffic congestion, the duties of work and the complicated ties of relationships. From wifi and cell towers and GPS signals and security cameras and radio and television and electromagnetic waves. Utility bills and wars, parents and climate change. The drought. It would be a stony, deathly peace. For a moment he imagined them all here, his family united in burial, laid happily together, wrapped cozily. Snug and still as mummies. He wondered if he was depressed and whether he ought to see a doctor about getting some medication. He pulled his headlamp down from the top of his head and shone it on the section he was working on. Veiny tendrils of dead tree roots, a layer at neck-height of century-compressed roadway backfill, below that black earth with stones the size of skulls. He picked at this earth with a spade, feeling around in it. He was looking for something, but he didn’t know what. Chunks gave way—he’d hit a softened vein—and so he dug.

  At night, thunder sounded in the distance but there was no rain. The city, the poor and the rich, sweated in their sheets. It was hot. A rare humidity laid a sticky grime over everything they touched.

  As far as Renee was concerned, Bea shouldn’t own a car. Now that she had the fear of the police, she drove even more erratically, as if subconsciously trying to flag the authorities by swerving, driving too slowly in fast lanes, too fast in slow lanes, turning in a giant arc in front of the few other cars on the road—the chorus of honking that followed her like a soundtrack that she couldn’t drive without.

  Renee felt sick in the back seat. Her head ached, and whether it was the nausea of concussion or the infernal swaying of the car, she needed to throw up. When the car stopped moving, she rolled down the window and did so.

  “Renee . . .” Bea said, the word drawn out in sympathy and alarm and revulsion.

  When Renee finished she wiped her mouth on the hem of her shirt and regarded her roommate, who gripped the steering wheel in concerned paralysis.

  People had whispered “amazon” behind Bea’s back her whole life, Renee knew. In the hallways at school, the boys on the bus, as she walked into restaurants. Her short, red hair and strong nose made her impossible to miss. Even Renee had, though she’d said it affectionately, appraising her six-plus feet and patting the muscles of the girl who was to be her welding partner. They liked each other immediately, and as Renee, a degreed perma-student, continued her tour of the course catalog—wood shop, chemistry, intro to German—French literature, gardening, auto-mechanics, algorithms, and on and on—settling on no theme she herself could decipher, they became great friends. Even now, as Bea recoiled at the puke-foam Renee had stained her shirt with, there was a wisdom in Bea’s eyes that she admired. The wisdom of big people, Renee thought, the wisdom of perspective and contemplation, the wisdom of acclimating to one’s abnormalities.

  If it were up to Bea, Renee knew, and if Renee were inclined, they would have continued up that ladder of intimacy.

  “I think you should drive now,” she whispered. Several police officers on foot had taken notice of the stopped car with the woman puking out the back. “Where are we going?”

  “I don’t know,” Bea said honestly.

  Renee groaned. The implication of continued motion was enough to cause the nausea to return.

  “Should we leave the city?” Bea said.

  “How much water do we have? How much gas?” Outside of the city was an unknown. Like everything else, gasoline had gone up many times in price and wasn’t reliably obtained. Farms had dried up. Beyond the city borders was a lawless wasteland.

  “Just the two gallons you stole out of a whole truck. Just saying.”

  Renee leaned back into the seat and studied the drab ceiling in the car. Despite the pain, her body hummed with an excitement from what she’d done. She thought again of her father, and then the others. The plan had been to lay low and not associate with each other for a few days, but the plan had also been to not be caught on camera with their identities exposed, and she shrunk further into the seat and hoped she hadn’t jeopardized them.

  Inevitably, Bea found herself on the familiar route to her parents’ house. It was obvious, she knew. The likely run-to spot, the refuge of all budding criminals destined to be caught. But Renee was tired and hurt and Bea’s parents were the picture of stability and she wasn’t sure where else to go. They would go quickly, to regroup.

  Her own mother, Renee thought, would press Renee to turn herself in, pointing toward the door with mild disgust, cigarette smoke trailing in one hand, gin in the other: you’re just like your father. Even so, despite the utter lack of romance her mother felt for it, she’d had her own heroics. Renee couldn’t help wonder if the frustrated wrath her mother directed at her was instead a bent arrow, pointing back at herself. A frustrated marriage, a frustrating culture she’d adopted, sobriety a frustration.
Even so, Renee felt like she’d performed some family rite now, some task that set her on equal footing with them, redeemed herself in their eyes: she’d begun her own fight.

  For a moment she could see her father’s face in her mind, the faintest touch of a smile breaking his beard’s grimace. When she was young, she remembered sitting on his lap as he whispered alcohol-fumed fantasies of better times, a better life, a more just universe. Seeing her right now, she thought, on the run as she was, he would give her that same dreamy smile.

  They parked outside and Bea gave Renee a shoulder to lean on as they climbed the concrete steps up to the house, a modern ranch on a rise. Bea’s mother opened the door and came down the stairs to greet them.

  “Oh Renee—you’re hurt! You’re on television!” Bea’s mother helped Renee up the rest of the stairs while Bea went back to the car for their water.

  The newscaster explained what was known of the crime. A still shot of her face encompassed the television screen, and she stared back uncomprehendingly, feeling woozy and not at all herself. Lining the bottom of the frame, block letters read “MAID MARIAN.”

  Footage played of Renee bleeding from a head wound and distributing jugs in a tender manner to a crowd of people who came forward one by one to accept them. The replay caught a magic that had not been there, or that she hadn’t been aware of, and it contrasted radically with the water distribution they were all familiar with, with its display of National Guard weaponry. It was the kind of footage that made a cameraman’s career—hypnotic and touching, and even Renee could see there was an emotional hook in there. You wished to cry and cheer a little. The station knew it. They replayed it again and again, between interviews with policemen and onlookers.