Sherwood Nation (13 page)

I think of you often down there conversing with my supposed-arch-enemy Monster Bartlett, explaining to him patiently how to save the people of our fair city while he ignores, nose pointed askew, hair glistening-hard and ready for take-off, the pointed dome of a space rocket that surely it is fashioned after. I know you’re fighting the good fight, and it makes me happy to think of you there.

Things are going well here. For instance, today I went the whole day without withering into a broken pile of bone-flesh and tears, wasteful tears, need us not remind us. A good day really, with a sense of accomplishment. There’s much to tell. The “King of Egypt” (long story) is still providing some of his own rations, and others have chipped in too, whatnot and so on, so that we’re keeping sustained, if not rail-thin-thinking-of-one’s-hungers-non-stop. The curves you admired? Hope you like angles instead.

Lots of nice folks up here, not saying there’s not. And lots to be sad about. I know you suggested I take up a hobby (idle hands do the devil’s etc) and hey! Does the finding and burying of dead people qualify? Is there accreditation? Small scholarly circles devoted to the study of? Society ladies gathering with the white wine and the foie gras and the shovels? Well anyway, I hope so, because I will have lots to share with and laugh about to said people when such hobby groups form, with hugs and the shedding of we’ve-all-been-there! type tears.

No but seriously I’m kind of sick of all this and losing a sense of whatthehell I’m even ontheplanet to do. You have a handle on that for yourself or are these the type of questions a person doesn’t necessarily go down the road of asking oneself, for the possibility a person might discover that these are questions with no answers, like light bulbs with no sockets? Just tell me, I’ll take any old sort of answer.

And so lastly, here I am here waiting for the, shall we say, subsequent parts of our relationship, as in the what-happens-next parts, where most likely I fly this coop, deciding that the burying of dead people is not the exciting up-and-coming hobby I thought it was, and head back down through the rough and tumble to your place, or you decide to give up on your career of mayoral counsel (but why, right? you have a job. I’m an outlaw, turns out) and come join me up in my Pharaoh’s lair. Odds are high on the former, things considered. Going to pretty much give it one last shot here, over the next few days, and then please be expecting me, wafer-thin, all angles and smiles, on your doorstop.

W/love/and/so/much/more

-r

She pulled together a small group of six. Armed with the newly acquired shotgun and other implements, they traveled her neighborhood, introducing themselves to neighbors as the Sherwood Club. At each house she knocked tentatively, fearing only deadened ears listened on the other side, his or her heart long ago having given up whatever losing fight it fought. It was hard to sleep at night thinking of them, their eyes seeing nothing.

When the wary “
who is it?
” called back, she became used to saying her assumed name in reply: “Maid Marian.” It grew easier on her tongue with each repetition.

“We’re establishing neighborhood security.” A curtain would flicker, or the door’s peephole. She imagined the Sherwood Club as a citizen force, taking up slack for absent city services. A safety net for people who could not fend for themselves. Usually they let her in, knowing her from the news. Sitting on the edge of a chair in a family’s living room, she felt how they simultaneously leaned toward and away from her, hopeful and anxious, this idealist warrior—or criminal, was it?—terribly real and in the flesh, in their homes. From them she learned of the bully down the street, who lurked at the perimeter of distribution, looking for water rations to steal like lunch money. She learned of the couple across the street who screamed at each other deep into the night, until the darkness filled with the sounds of glass breaking and things thrown and hurt. She made sure to speak at length to each house about their neighbors, for to know those around you, she thought, was to lose your fear of them. To bind your story to theirs. They were islands no longer, each of these houses, she was sewing them together.

She tried to fix what problems she could. She held an impromptu court at the water bully’s house, inviting all of the neighbors from the block to show up and listen to him speak his crimes. The domestic-violence couple she invited to live under her roof, that they might be tempered by community, or separated if need be. Many problems, she found, only needed a slight bump to jar them from the hard track they followed, and many more were not in her power to affect. Like a halo it spread out from her house, she imagined, a ring of safety.

But the deaths were hard. Three blocks from HQ they found a locked house with boarded-up windows. Bea used a crowbar to remove the wood from a window. Amid the squalor inside they found the bloated corpse of an old woman lying in bed. They wrapped her in her blankets and buried her in the cemetery. Among the items on her dresser Renee found a water identification card.

Two days later they found another body, eleven blocks away, this one covered in a storm of insects. An elderly man, they thought, but it was difficult to tell much else. They buried him, too.

After the burial Renee sat next to the grave and stared at her shoes. One week and three dead buried. The bell no longer tolled inside her like it had. She’d become afraid of what they might find in each house, and while they’d had successes, her Sherwood Club became dispirited.

That night a man walked into the house late at night and Leroy, hearing him from the third floor, began calling “intruder!” in what to Renee’s ears sounded like the electronic tone of a warehouse alarm system.

As people gathered weapons and filtered cautiously downstairs, the man claimed he was a friend of Renee’s.

There was barely light to see by, enough to catch a glint off the pistol the man had raised in the air, surrender and not surrender.

“Listen y’all,” he drawled in an accent that was in no way convincing. “I know Renee is here.”

“No one here by that name,” Julia said.

“Maid Marian then?” He smirked. “She and I did the heist downtown. We did that together, OK? I’m one of the good guys.”

From the top of the stairs Renee said, “This is Josh, everybody.”

“Everybody,” Josh said.

“Come on up,” Renee said, “but put the gun away.” She brought him into the big room at the front of the house on the second floor that she’d kept empty. There was an old couch there and a couple of chairs. She lit a candle and it flickered dimly against the walls. Members of her Sherwood Club gathered round.

Without sitting he began to dig in his pockets. “Look what I’ve got, kids.” The accent gone.

He’d cut his beard close, Renee noticed. He moved with a nervous and excited energy, checking the pockets in his backpack. His hair an uncertain color, blond and brown with premature gray in it. Were it not the for the drought, she would have suspected him of adding the gray himself.

“Now wait a minute, it’s here somewhere. What an operation, right? You’ve got bodyguards, you fruitcake. Ah.” He pulled a dozen laminated cards from his pocket and spread them in front of them on the floor like a winning card hand.

“Water IDs,” Renee said.

“Water. IDs.” Josh pointed at them with each word and bounced on his feet.

“But where is everybody?” Renee said.

“Janey’s in jail, Davis’s MIA. And look at you, all the reputation.”

“You saw Zach?” Renee said.

“Your boyfriend. That was a surprise. So my idea is we start harvesting these IDs. We set up a mini distribution and make a profit besides. It’s good to see you, Renee.” He leaned in and gave her a brief hug.

She studied him in the candlelight. He was a white-collar radical. Well-schooled and tall and athletic. She didn’t know his background well, but had always assumed he was one of those kids from a wealthy conservative family who had eschewed his parents’ ideals and gone to some hippie college to snowboard and smoke pot. But his parents could not be stamped out of him, and before long he was morphing into an amalgam of the two creatures. Underneath you sensed someone whose ambition was unceasing. Even if the tenets of the ambition aligned closely with hers, he intimidated her with his relentless pursuit of them. There would have been no water heist without him.

He could be running this, she thought. She felt a sense of relief then. She wouldn’t have to do all the heavy lifting, to be in charge. She could just participate in the movement, whatever it was, this citizen-gang or Robin Hood–whatever, a hollow figurehead perhaps or simply a worker bee. She wouldn’t have to be responsible for everyone else.

“What have you heard about us?” she said and remembered Zach’s advice: to listen and assess, and then refine and replant the rumor you want perpetuated. And as she said it she knew there was something else here too, something that she could not let go of.

“Zach said you came up to hide from the police. Everybody is all Maid Marian this and that. A dude three blocks down said you were watching out for him.” He chuckled.

Renee shrugged. “Anyway.”

“You’re not doing that great at the hiding, if that’s what you’re doing.”

“The chaos up here hides well enough. The people hate the city government, and the police never come north of Fremont, as far as we can tell.” She reached over and grabbed the mug she drank water from, but it was empty. She felt exposed in front of him. “We’re making something,” she said quietly.

“Still. You’re going to make yourself in police custody, is what.”

Renee didn’t feel like answering. Josh took a unit gallon out of his pack and filled her cup. Bea appeared in the doorway and Josh filled her a cup, too.

“Yeah, well anyway,” he said, “what do you think of my idea? This could be twelve gallons a day, right? First we steal a scanner to verify them. Then we make a little salon here gussying up people like the pics in the cards. You got people. We run these through the system—that’s a lot of extra water, right?”

“And the water?”

“Same as before, to the people. Or you know, what happened, like at the heist.”

“But that’s taking from distribution—I’m not sure that’s the rich I intended to rob.”

“Distribution is the system, the system is a tool of the rich.”

It sounded like it belonged on a bumper sticker, and for a moment she felt like kicking the legs off the closest chair. Josh just wanted to fuck the man, she could see now. He was a disruptor. She could smell the water he’d given her in the cup in her hand. She took a deep breath and stood.

“It’s a clever idea, Josh,” Renee said. “Let’s do it. We’re desperate for water, it’s true. Bea and I have been skimming food and water rations from the others. It gets old.” Bea made an exclamatory noise in the background. “So I’m game. But you understand,” she said, “this is a survival play. It’s the means to a goal, but not a goal itself.”

Groundbreaking ceremonies were once the type of dull, idiotic event the mayor would have attempted to avoid at all costs. But all that had changed in this landscape of bad news. An event where he could appear wi
thout people specifically seeking him out as the target of their raging invectives was an event worthy of consideration. These types of ceremonies were poor venues for protest. And so, after his brief speaking role and television shot, he left with a whistle on his lips and a buoyant bump in his stride.

Now he splayed his feet out across the backseat of the car and relaxed. There was a police car following, and it was a short ride back to his office-home. This gathering had been about the construction of a new shelter to accommodate refugees. In the end, it was an emptyish gesture, the result of a long, drawn-out fight between various council members, several of whom he’d shared the stage with. Each had diluted the others’ ideas until what was left was but a token. But officially it was a
good thing
. No one could say that refugees did not need a place. No one could chant out
Heartless Bartlett! Heartless Bartlett!
with tuneless volume at the construction of a shelter. And any victory, no matter how small, was worth notching up in one’s mind, a reminder that
yes
: He was there to do good, and good could be done. Right?

The phone rang. It was the chief of police. There had been a tip: They had found Maid Marian’s hiding place. The mayor sat upright in his car and pounded on the driver’s seat-back.

“Stop! For god’s sake, stop for a minute.” He plugged one ear and pressed his other to the receiver. “You’re sure?”

Yes he was sure, the police chief replied in his easy, lethargic style, as if, the mayor thought, he’d eaten a side of beef and was swilling the last of the cognac in his leather smoking chair. He informed the mayor that she was deep in Northeast Portland in a red zone, an area of the city no longer actively patrolled by police.

Somehow he’d pictured her close in, waiting to pounce again, and to learn that she was up in the city’s wastelands diminished his opinion of her. “What the hell is she doing up there?”

The police chief didn’t have a good answer for this.

“And the National Guard, they already know?”

“No, not at all, sir, you’re the first to hear,” the police chief said.

“Well, that’s fine, fine, not sure they need to bother with this business. Shall we keep it to ourselves? What do you propose, Freddy?”

The police chief hummed into the phone and the mayor drove one thumb into his forehead as he waited for the man to speak.

“Perhaps? In the morning, they could. Strike first thing,” the police chief ambled. “At dawn? Catch them sleeping when the neighborhood was at its coolest.”

“Yes, put that together, Freddy. Tomorrow morning, right? We’re not talking about sometime next August. And Freddy? No killing. She’s got to come in safe.”

The mayor hung up the phone and smiled. This was something to look forward to. He relished the idea of sitting down to chat with her in a jail cell.

He spent some time pondering this and knew exactly how he would behave with the city’s new hero and news-hog, their water thief and prospective false savior. Cordially, of course. Gracefully. But she would spend the rest of the drought—if it ever ended—in jail, that was for certain.

Let’s see what the National Guard and the citizens have to say about that, he thought.

Josh held the scanner up like an Olympic torch when he returned. Renee sat at the main table on the first floor and he deposited it in front of her. It was a simple machine—a black plastic handle with a three-by-three-inch screen at the end, the barcode
-reading red of a laser emitted from the back.

“Where in the hell did you find that?” Renee said.

“You ever heard of Gregor? I went asking, you know? One of his dudes. Cost a freaking lot, right? Check it.” Josh held up a card and turned on the scanner.

“Wait,” Renee said. “For fuck sake, you idiot. Wait.”

Josh gave her an irritated look and scanned the card anyway. “You realize the power we have here? This is the root of our whole operation.” The scanner read the back of the card, and a second later a picture of an older, paunchy, Hispanic man appeared on the screen, and below him a few details.