Sherwood Nation (3 page)

Tremendous precision was needed—the water truck would only be in the alley for forty seconds; everything needed to be exactly in place, as they’d practiced a hundred times. She found herself humming an old Genesis song and wished it were otherwise but it went over and over in her brain—fuck all, she thought, this wasn’t the badass self she had in mind for herself. Still.

At an intersection she jumped onto the sidewalk and rounded a building cruising fast. There was a man in her way in an overcoat, completely immobile. She wondered if she had frozen him with her speed, deer on the tracks in the lights of the approaching train—there was no choice but to hit him or veer. She swerved to the left and her handlebar caught on a parking meter and jerked the front tire sideways. The bike came to an abrupt halt and she was launched, bouncing once on the roof of a parked Mercedes with a hollow thud and landing in the street, shoulder and face first.

For a moment she couldn’t move, her breath gone and traffic rushing toward her, blood in her left eye and a feeling like her shoulder had come loose at the socket, like some toy, she thought, like a Mr. Potato Head, with its pullable arms.

“
Fuck,” she managed when she could breathe again and the man with the overcoat was pulling her to her feet. He said nothing, just gripped her bicep and steered her to the curb where her bike awaited. Its wheel was turned askew from the handlebars.

“
What,” she said and shrugged off the man’s grip.

“
Well, listen,” the man said.

She jerked her chin at him and then noticed his expression. He wanted to help, she saw, and appeared now to have all the time in the world for her. One of those types who must have had a job downtown at some point, a manager of something, and now returned daily, donning his overcoat, pacing old routes, hoping for some something—anything—to happen. She righted her bike and yanked on the wheel to bring it back into true with the handlebars. The man hovered next to her. She held up one hand. “Listen, I’m cool. Just in a terrible hurry,” she said, a little creeped out by his closeness and ready to deck him if he slowed her down.

“
All right,” the man said, “go on then.”

“
I will,” she said. She mounted and rode off down the street, fleeing the stopped cars and the passersby who had begun to gather and wonder. Right now, to do this job, she needed to conjure up that deep inner hellion, that thing which is trained out, which civilization replaces, that thing that wishes to consume the world for its own damn self.

She felt a drop of blood trickle down her cheekbone and the dusty wind on the abrasion. She forced herself through the rickety, pulsing pain in her arm. She rode down a flight of stairs at Pioneer Square and just managed to squeak in front of a van.

The truck always took a shortcut through a back alley to avoid the busy intersection at Fourth. They’d studied it every day as it went to supply the big houses in the West Hills. A wind pushed at the traffic lights, swinging them on their wires, and for the briefest of moments she thought there was a smell of rain in the air but it was only a nostalgic trick, a nasal mirage.

The alleyway was one block away. She checked her watch and slowed, sighting down the street for Josh’s sign. There he was, on his bicycle, a brown handkerchief stretched tight across his nose and mouth, the big baskets on the bike rack and the trailer behind. He held his hand up high in the air, five fingers, then folded them down one by one. When there were none left he shook the fist that remained. She swallowed the last of her fear and whooped with a warcry.

She cornered like she’d practiced, like she’d done a hundred times. She turned into the alley and smacked full on into the front of the water delivery truck, leaping before impact so that she hit the windshield on an incline, her body tucked into itself so that her side took the impact. She hit with terrific force—she hadn’t practiced enough after all—and tumbled to the ground outside of the truck’s trajectory as it squealed to a halt.

The driver knelt in front of her and though she could feel herself passing out, her vision dimming, the blackness coming from the edges, she felt sorry for him.

She didn’t dare pass out. She pleaded with herself in the fraction of a second before her mind closed like a camera’s shutter. Then time bloomed like a flower. The adrenalin that pumped through her body circulated uselessly. Her mind closed in to its own private viewing room and she saw Zach in a room full of water, glass jars of it, stacked in a wall about them. Each jar of liquid produced a hum. She could hear this now. The sunlight glistened and sparkled in each. They sat in this water library and listened to the sound of each of the water monologues like solo artists vibrating out a siren call, and they held hands. She was in her buried mind, and there the water sung to her its own song.

She groaned. It felt like her chest had been crushed. The driver was repeating an apology. She tried to find a hand to push against the ground with.

“
Whoa, now. Stay there, an ambulance is coming—you got to stay there. If you’ve got something broken inside—”

She could hear the action at the back of the truck commence. The driver did not.

She didn’t want to move; she wanted an ambulance to come, to be taken care of, to be lifted by her mother’s arms and placed in bed. She wished Zach were there. But it would do no good to go to the hospital and be implicated. The plan was to flee, to leave the crime scene the way she’d come, to be a momentary decoy. She pushed the driver’s hand away and stood up and swayed with dizziness and fell, but the driver caught her and she embraced him, tasted the sweat at his neck, the water that he gave off, the wastewater which could not be wasted. She rested her chin against his collarbone and felt herself slipping back into darkness. I’m sorry, she told him. She was aware of the crowd gathering, of her photograph being taken.

She stood by herself. Her bike was not damaged and while the driver yelled,
lady, wait!
she climbed on it and coasted toward the back of the truck where there were scavengers pulling bottles out of boxes. A few scattered flyers were on the ground, and others held them in their hands. It’d been a success, and now she was breaking plan. Her people had already come, filled up and gone, like the precise engines they were, their point made, and she knew she was supposed to get away, too. There were news cameras, alerted to this renegade truck, but they got something else entirely. They got her.

“
Get back!” she yelled to the hoarders, feeling a sudden protectiveness for the driver, and perhaps because there was blood on her face the raiders eased back from the loot. She saw the bottles lying there on the ground and she thought the driver wouldn’t mind if she had one sip. She was so terribly thirsty. Just one bottle to prove to herself that she’d done what she’d done. It was only fair. A crowd of people hovered in the alley now and she thought she could hear sirens. The driver yelled something, part surprise, part anger, and as a woman with a canvas shopping bag snagged a bottle he lunged for it. They pulled the gallon back and forth, her grip on the handle besting his. These were no unit gallons, ID’d and traceable, but anonymous and unmarked.

Renee pulled a gallon out of a box and turned to put it in her pannier and then she saw the crowd again. They searched her face, tried to make sense of the situation, greedily eyeing the boxes spilled from the truck like some dragon’s mound of wealth upset. In front of them the stalemated wrestle between the driver and the woman. The crowd watched Renee, a woman with blood on her face and a cracked helmet and two long black braids, Hispanic maybe, her eyes vacant, or perhaps extra illuminated, more alive than they felt. They saw her drop her bike and take two bottles and approach them, giving one first to the woman wrestling with the driver so that his catch was suddenly freed and he lurched backward, another to a young boy half her height with dirt on his cheeks. She brought two more out, handing them into open hands, and two more. Then she handed another to the driver who stood on the side, his face grim, saying nothing. He was one of them, the crowd saw suddenly, a man with a part-time job, a driver, no more. She handed out more, and they were still, waited for her to place a gallon into their own arms. For a moment she thought she could do this forever, place water into the arms of those who needed it. This was what she wanted.

Then she stumbled, her bright eyes dimming. The crowd reached out, caught and righted her. She climbed on her bike. Their hands steadied her, but the sound had drained from the picture, as if someone had sucked the air out, averse to the low garble that the scene would make in slow motion. To the side, cameras caught everything.

The next thing she remembered she was riding her bike toward the river, that toxic mud slough, a gallon in each pannier, the world tinged red with the blood in her eyes.

At home she set her bike down on the front porch and a wave of dizziness overtook her. She went to her knees and felt how her shoulder and chest and head ached. She stumbled inside and found the couch and smiled to herself. She’d done it. They’d done it. She lay down. She needed to synch up with the others, but right now she needed to close her eyes for a moment.

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.