Sherwood Nation Read online

  The police chief said there were three accomplices, water thieves on bicycles. “It means less for everyone else,” he said. There was a menacing way in which he said it: if you cross me again, citizens, no water for no one. He asked anyone with information to please contact the police. One hundred and ninety four gallons were lost, he said. That’s nearly two hundred people’s daily rations.

  “They weren’t rations,” Renee said into the room.

  “Water crime’s a felony,” Bea’s father said, absorbed in the newscast.

  An image was shown of the truck, filled with unit gallons, and a large white question mark flashed over the top of it.

  “Clearly, this was a robbery,” the newscaster said, “but who was robbed? We were there on a tip, and we assume now the tip was given to us by Maid Marian’s group. But where was the truck going with so many pre-filled water bottles? Flyers were found at the scene claiming that this is a private truck carrying water to the West Hills. Under the Portland Water Act this makes the truck itself illegal. The driver is missing and is considered a suspect, and in the meantime the city has seized it. Many questions remain. We’ll stay on top of it for you.”

  “The city has seized it,” Renee said and looked around the room at Bea’s family. “Sure they have. Nice one.”

  Bea’s dad got up and paced to the window and looked out. Renee thought she heard him say fugitive. She’d known him for several years as an amiable fellow who never said much of anything in conversation, but now he seemed a little frightening, and she wondered if he’d turn her in.

  “Well, I think you look very heroic,” Bea’s mother said. Her voice trembled. “What are you going to do?”

  “I have no idea.” Renee leaned her head back on the couch and closed her eyes. She was exhausted and hurt, and yet there was something in the air. She could feel how her image was being broadcast over the city.

  Zach watched the nightly news with amazement and horror as his girlfriend’s image was played over and over.

  After the blackout came he curled up on his couch and stared at the deadened TV and felt sick to his stomach. He wondered if she was already in custody by now. He went to the roof and listened to the night. There were sirens and the sound of people in the street. The night was hot and humid and the stars felt predatory, a billion interested eyes, recording. She was out there somewhere.

  At three in the morning she climbed into his bed and spooned against him.

  He scrambled up. “How did you get in?” and then after he’d wakened a little more: “I saw what happened.” He clutched her forearm. “I hoped you’d show up.”

  She told him they’d gone to Bea’s parents and had to run out the back. “We left the car. Look what I’ve got Bea into.” She pushed him back onto his side on the bed and pressed her face against his back. After a while he could feel that she was crying. “I won’t get you involved.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry. Are you hurt? Have you heard from any of the others?”

  “No one. Bea’s asleep on your couch. I fucked up with Bea’s parents.”

  Zach turned them both so that he could get a grip on her.

  “What am I going to do?” she said.

  “You could stay here.”

  “And do what? Stay in your house and like be your house servant?”

  Yes, he thought to himself, imagining the time they’d get to spend together, but dared not say it. Seattle or to the south were other possibilities, but there were rumors of regular carjackings in the rural stretches of the highway, and the occasional blockade. He didn’t want her to leave. If the media played her image on an infinite loop it would get picked up on other stations across the country as the requisite “drought imagery of the day,” and then nowhere was safe.

  “Northeast Portland is spinning out of control,” he said. “They’ll either put it under martial law, or let it fall into a lawless slum. I’m betting the latter. There aren’t enough police to patrol there and the rich areas too. You could hide in that mess. It’s not safe, but it might be safe from the police.”

  She was quiet for a long time and he listened to her breathe. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen her scared before, but he could hear it now in her breath as a new and wholly different future opened before her. Or, he wondered, was he mistaking this quiet for fear, when instead it was a buzzing thrill, an adrenalin drunk for what she’d done.

  “Are you hurt?” he asked again. He lit a candle. “Let’s take a look at you.”

  This he could do something about, and he took pleasure in taking care of her. He carefully unwrapped her head bandage. She had a scrape on her forehead that needed cleaning and a deeper injury at her hair linethat probably needed stitches, though it was too late to do a lot with it. She had bruises on her ribs and legs, her yellow-brown skin turning the bruises a livid purple. In the candlelight her eyes flickered intensely as she watched him. He went rummaging through medicine cabinets and came up with a field cocktail of medical supplies, turmeric and super glue and began reworking the dressing.

  “I want you to know, this hurts me more than it does you.”

  “Pfff,” she said.

  He took hold of her ear. “This, hmm, yes. I’m afraid we’ll need to amputate.”

  “Come on,” she said.

  He cleaned her head wound, sprinkled in some turmeric and then, holding the wound closed, dabbed a thick seal of superglue over the top of it.

  “Weird,” she said. “If I find out the turmeric is a joke . . .”

  “I swear, it’s not.”

  “What other spices are you going to use? I’m like some kind of pizza now?”

  “Curry.” He noticed that she took a breath in the middle of sentences. “You having trouble breathing?”

  “A little.”

  He felt along her ribs, conscious of her nakedness in the candlelight. “I don’t know a lot about ribs, but it feels OK. I’m guessing you’ve got a crack, maybe a bruise.”

  “Just a bruise then.”

  “Correct.”

  “So you’re saying I should stop my whining?”

  “Pretty much.”

  Back in bed they lay on their backs and stared at the ceiling.

  “I don’t want you to be a fugitive,” he said. “I want us to, you know, go out.”

  “I’m not sexier as a fugitive? With a head wound?”

  “I don’t think you’re taking this seriously enough,” Zach said.

  “I need you to roll over and hug me because my ribs hurt too much to move. But softly, OK? I don’t know what else to do. I’m just going to make jokes about it, because otherwise I’ll think about it, and then I’ll be terrified.”

  “OK,” he said. “A little bit sexier.”

  After some time, she said, “I’ll go to the Northeast—that’s probably where the others went. If that doesn’t work, I’ll come back here. I’ll be your housegirl.”

  “Mm,” he said, and allowed himself to quietly ponder it for a moment. “You need some kind of a hobby to keep you from getting into trouble. Idle hands are the devil’s et cetera. Promise to lay low?”

  Renee didn’t answer, and he could sense she was elsewhere, already on the journey across the city perhaps, or stuck in the infinite media loop of the truck robbery, or maybe seriously playing out a prospective stay at his house: how they might sit and have dinner-rations together in the evening, every evening, how she could be his for a while. He inhaled in her black hair and heard the deepening sighs of her sleep.

  Zach pulled on a pair of shorts and felt his way downstairs to the dining room table. Outside a dusty wind blew and he could feel it nudge insistently against the old, leaky windows. He fetched a piece of paper and started to doodle so that his mind could relax into the project at hand. There was work to do—he wanted a day to think out a plan, to send them prepared and equipped. It was difficult to visualize anything that would lead back to normality—without jail time or violence or dying of thirst.

/>   On a whim he ran to the roof of the three-story building he’d inherited from his mother to take a look where they were headed. The sky had begun to pale. He scanned the horizon to the north for tall objects. There were two water towers on 19th and Prescott to the Northeast that stuck above the line of brown trees. One was a great, bulbous thing, like a pustule from the ground, the other an awkward contraption on stilts. Neither held water now. He knew these towers—in high school he’d climbed the big one with friends and they’d gotten drunk on top, reveling in the view and the power of disobeying the law. They’d descended madly, laughing at the height and the danger, and then were sobered upon reaching the bottom and looking up at how high they’d been.

  He taped a green laser pointer to the barrel of his telescope. When he pressed the button on the laser pointer, through the telescope he saw the small green bead appear on the fat underside of the water container. Ah ha, he thought. A communication link to the Northeast is made.

  He lowered the scope until the green bead would be visible to those on the ground, and then cranked down on the tripod stand to freeze it there. Experimentally he tried out a message in Morse code:

  .. /—.. ... ... / -.——- ..- I miss you.

  He fetched his video camera and set it up on its tripod, pointed it at the space on the water tower, zoomed in all the way. Then he attached a timer to that, set to start after sundown. An hour each evening should do. There was no reason not to leave the camera set up. Rain was not imminent.

  When there was no other communication, they could still send these messages, at least. He felt like he was sending her across the frozen wastes or the desert, into space.

  He scavenged for tools and supplies. He found two empty liter bottles and filled them out of his water savings—a pittance. They would need a map, bicycles, a list of friends or safe houses.

  Back in his room he paused for a moment to watch her sleep. The bruises had darkened. Her right arm lay across the sheet, brown and muscular. Her hair snaked across the pillows and over her shoulder. He fought the craving to get back in bed with her for these last few moments but decided he’d rather prepare them for safety, a sort of insurance for her return voyage.

  In the kitchen he looked for a better way to visualize the players. He needed to see the board in front of him and so he pulled down a few jars from his spice rack and positioned them on the table like opposing armies. The media, the city police force and the National Guard, the mayor, the rioting Northeast, Maid Marian, the drought, and the populace at large.

  There he sat, the chess pieces laid out, attempting to figure out how to steer Renee above capture, while in his mind the video they had played of her sounded like a trumpet call of war. He positioned the spice jars in a circle at first and considered them, and then tried making groupings. Cayenne, curry, salt and dill on one side and parsley and rosemary on the other.

  “Mmm, looks like breakfast,” Renee said from behind him. “Right?” she asked hopefully. “You’re fixing breakfast?”

  “I have you here as salt.” Unconsciously he gave the salt shaker a caress.

  “I’m definitely cayenne, ask anyone.”

  “Well anyway—”

  “Or pepper.”

  “I’m pepper.”

  “You’re pepper? How’d you even get in this game? You’re supposed to be my secret boyfriend.”

  “What? Why am I secret?” Zach said and gripped the pepper.

  “Well, not secret, but, anyway, cayenne?—”

  “—Is the media. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to lessen your crime so that—”

  “It wasn’t a crime,” she said. “It was exposing a crime.”

  “Yes, but not really. Maybe in the people’s mind, but robbing a truck is robbing a truck. And the police chief seems bent on calling a spade a spade. What are your possibilities here? At this point you’re going to be seen by the police as the ringleader of an organized crime group. They’re not going to forget that. Especially now that you’re a media darling. They’re going to use you as an example, and stealing water carries a heavy sentence.”

  “But stealing from whom? They were stealing, we were returning!”

  Zach sighed. “Listen, I understand your point, but that water belonged to somebody. It was a lot of water, and worth a lot of money. You heard the police chief. They’re going to find you. So what’s your plan?”

  She shrugged. “I’ll go to Northeast Portland. I’ll get in contact with the rest of the group and we’ll bust more trucks and give the water to the people.”

  “What? What happened to staying out of trouble?”

  “I slept on it.”

  “So, Robin Hood, you do want to be the ringleader of an organized crime group.”

  “I don’t know about the leader bit, but otherwise yeah. Where’s your outrage here?”

  “At what—the weather?” Zach said it overly loud and slammed the edge of the table with the palm of his hand. His grandmother’s salt shaker toppled over, spreading a thin veneer of white.

  Renee pointed. “That was me, right?”

  Zach took a deep breath. “I regret saying that.” He stared down at his lap and noticed his shorts were seasoned with white grains. “I know you have some serious problems here. I think with a little planning—”

  “Zach—you’re always planning. And organizing and cataloging and recording and doing every preliminary step so as to avoid acting. I think what you do—writing ads, trying to make what the city needs palatable—is great. I mean it’s a mixed bag, you know that, and you’re doing what you can in there. But somebody has got to be out here on the front line.”

  “What front line? Why you? I’m here trying to plan so you don’t get killed or put in jail, and you’re doing the opposite.”

  “You know what I can do? I can make a killer foam leaf imprint on top of a latte. I can expound on the collapse of the Roman empire. I’m a lousy welder. I speak French and Spanish. I could probably fix your car.”

  “I don’t have a car.”

  “Exactly. You know of any jobs out there for me with those skills?”

  “Please—”

  “But you know what is available, Zach? You know what I like? I like that chick they’re showing on TV. That chick could make a difference. That’s who I want to be. That’s who I am.”

  Zach sighed and swept his hand across the table, brushing the spilled salt to the floor. “That’s not a job,” he said softly.

  “I’ve already done it, I can do it again,” Renee said.

  “That’s a crime. If you want to expose issues with water distribution you should have gone to the press. That’s their job.”

  “You think they’re going to do something? They don’t have people down there trying to”—Renee made quotes of her fingers—“‘figure stuff out’, not for real anyway. Rations got tightened to one unit gallon. Where do you think that truck was going? Does that not drive you crazy?”

  Zach held his hands up, “All right, OK, we don’t have to talk about the bigger picture. It does drive me crazy. But let’s strategize for a moment—humor me—along your plan of action. Look at this.” He held up his diagrams for communication methods and explained the laser pointer Morse code setup.

  She patted his shoulder. “Neat, you dork. Of course you know Morse code.”

  “Wake Bea, we’ve got work to do.” He handed her a hand-drawn card he’d made her with a Morse code translation. “You leave at dark.”

  Mayor Bartlett was late. He’d decided to walk, that they should all walk together, and enter the meeting hall in a triumphant micro-parade of optimism. But if he was not mistaken, when he claimed that they should do so, someone in his entourage clearly huffed. Huffed! A policeman maybe, or even, could it have been? His communications director. She had worked hard, as hard as he, on the proposal they were going to present to the city commissioners.

  “What?” he said, turning to inspect each of them. “Is the car not hot and crowded?”
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br />   “Sir?” his police bodyguard said, gripping his thumbs through his police belt for adjustment, pausing for acknowledgement.

  The mayor wilted, rolling his neck, knowing he was on the verge of receiving a security lecture he’d heard countless times. “Gary?” he said.

  “Sir, it’s not that—”

  “It’s fine, Gary, we’ll take the car.” He needed to save all his fight for the committee. The proposal, thick with hope and pleasantly weighty in his hand, felt like a sort of shield. Not just from whatever violence a random citizen might want to inflict, but from public opinion, too. They’d battled out the details for weeks and it was great, it was perfect.

  “You don’t mind that—”

  “The car,” he said, “to the car.” He raised his fist to signal the charge, proposal and all.

  Three advisors—the communications director, economic development director, youth strategies coordinator—and the policeman bodyguard shuffled toward the door, their queueing to exit awkward and apologetic. He followed behind, but dipped into his office at the last moment. There Christopher sat at the mayor’s desk, helping to write a letter to community leaders.