Sherwood Nation (38 page)

Zach made a square with his fingers and looked through it, wishing he could cut the rooftop’s profile out of the cloud above him, so that a square slice of moist could nourish his plants.

He made his way to the roof’s edge to take a look down the street, hoping like hell that he wouldn’t see a dead body down there.

There was a man in the street on his back next to a station wagon with its driver’s-side door open. He was struggling to get up on two elbows and Zach could see he’d been shot. His clothes glistened darkly at the hip and there was a slickness to the street at his waist. At the back of the station wagon two water raiders quickly and precisely removed gallon after gallon of water from the back. So they’d caught a hoarder. Zach ran for the stairs.

By the time he got there the raiders were gone. The man had a thick beard and he was in a state of shock. His eyes didn’t track well and he asked Zach several times about the location of a gas station. He was shot in the thigh. Zach couldn’t think what to do—he yelled out for his neighbors, for someone to contact an ambulance, but there was no response. The streets had gone scary calm.

Zach helped pull the man to a one-legged stand and the man went limp in his arms in a noodly faint. Zach embraced him, holding him upright in a tight hug, his own clothes becoming doused with blood and his body shaking with the effort. He started to inch his way toward his front door until the man came to and then they weakly hop-hobbled into his house.

He laid the bearded man out on the floor of the kitchen and took a pair of scissors to his pant leg. There was a hole on his upper thigh the size of a nickel, and an exit wound at the back of his leg. What the man needed, Zach thought, was a thorough cleaning of the wound, antiseptic, antibacterial, stitches, weeks of bed rest, and whatever else a hospital could offer. What Zach had was a bottle of hydrogen peroxide he was loath to use. Exposing hydrogen peroxide to air formed water and in turn would become drinkable.

He settled on a battlefield medic cocktail of one unit of hydrogen peroxide, salt, honey and turmeric. Then he duct-taped a wad of clean dish towels tightly around the leg. Amid moans, the man fainted again, giving his head a solid whack on the kitchen floor tile.

He wished Renee were there. There was a reassurance in her taking charge, a comfort in her command. You trusted her. But Renee wouldn’t have pulled the man in, a water hoarder, invited danger into her house like he had, would she? She drew limits, made rules, created policies. He didn’t know anymore.

He had no way to get the man to the hospital, and no way to contact emergency services. He could go flag down a rare car or the police, he supposed, and he pondered the likelihood one might stop for him.

Inside he fussed around the kitchen. The injured was laid out like an island on the floor. After a while he came to and groaned. When Zach leaned down to understand what the man said he clutched Zach’s shirt front with snake-like speed and whispered “thank you,” and then put his hands over his face and cried.

His mother’s old bedroom was closest, and so he helped him there.

“So?” Zach said.

Zach fetched him a no-spill sip cup with two units of water and some pain killer. After the man had hungrily consumed both, Zach tried again: “What’s your story?”

With a weak, halting voice, the man told him he’d driven here from Oklahoma.

“To make some quick cash?” Zach guessed the station wagon could have carried a good eighty or so gallons of water. A small fortune on the right market.

The man gave him a wary glance. “I grew up on my grandfather’s dustbowl stories. I sold a few gallons to get by, that’s it.”

“To the wrong people, I take it. Now you know what the populace thinks of hoarders.”

“I told you already. Not a hoarder.”

“Well,” Zach said. “Everybody hoards a little, that’s basic, it’s human, but you can’t go round with that much in your car.”

Zach took some glee in the analytical aspect of having a patient. He found a clipboard and sketched out a set of statistics to track the progress.

Patient Name

Time of arrival

Minutes lying down

Units of water consumed

Grams of food taken

Pain killers

He had a quick bout of homesickness for the map room and Renee. There had to be other measures he could use to track. Well-being? Words spoken? Or better: Verbosity. A subjective measure to track a subjective statistic. Answer range: Silent, reticent, inquisitive, chatty, verbose. It was a rough scale, and he knew that a “normal” wouldn’t be set until he’d gotten a feel for the average.

He drew each of these statistics on a ten-day chart and began to fill out day one.

“Name?” he said.

The man groaned and opened his eyes and said, “More water.”

“Yes, but what’s your name?”

“Nombre.”

Zach hovered over
Clarity,
readying to mark negative and somewhat surprised that they’d already spiraled into this. “I’m asking your name,” he tried again.

“Nombre—means ‘name’ in Spanish—dad thought it was funny. Last name White.”

Zach frowned at how it looked at the top of his patient statistics. Nombre White. Like first grade Spanish homework, he thought. It diminished the sex appeal of the chart significantly. He erased it, and wrote: “Mr. White, Water Hoarder.”

He inspected his chart and saw that the patient had gone to sleep. A feeling of disappointment came and went. He wondered what was happening in the map room in Sherwood. On his chart, he made an extra column for sleep and marked the time with satisfaction. He hung the chart on the wall and it felt like adding a title on a painting, a still life.
Wounded water hoarder, asleep on mother’s bed.
It was a perfect moment.

Upon closing the door to the house in which he’d hid, Martin jumped at the sight of the behemoth, lifelike painting of Jesus in the entry way, looking down
on him with stern, agonized, compassionate eyes, blood seeping from his forehead crown.

A short, older woman appeared directly in front of the painting, her head at Jesus’s neck height, so that in the dim light it briefly appeared as though the giant Jesus head had grown a diminutive, wizened body to carry it around.

“Que?” the woman said with a volume and severity Martin had not thought possible in such a small person.

Goddamnit
, Martin thought, she’s just an old lady and standing in front of Jesus to boot. But there was nothing to be done. He stretched out his hands for her neck.

But she moved like a jackrabbit. Before he could get his hands around her neck, she grabbed a baseball bat at the foot of the painting and swung it into his blind-side knee.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Martin hollered in pain and dropped to the floor. He gripped the damaged knee and she stood over him with the bat raised. “No no no, please,” Martin yelled. “Holy shit, lady! Yo soy buena gente, buena gente!”

She left him then and he stayed where he was on the floor feeling sorry for himself. He was thirsty and damaged. For a moment, as he lay there, he had occasion to consider his current trajectory. A few deep thoughts shuffled through him as to the meaning of his own life. And then he decided that when that lady shitbird came back, this time he was going to wring her little old leathery neck, without fail.

He wasn’t sure how long he lay on the floor of the dusty entranceway, breathing in the smell of old people house. The bloodied Jesus looked down on him, now with less compassion and more spite. A man of fifty-three, he thought. This is kid’s work. Lying on the floor with a busted knee.

After a while she came back. In one hand she had a small glass of water, in the other she gripped the baseball bat. She offered him the glass.

“Gracias,” he croaked. He gulped the water down and leaned his head back against the floor.

Her name was Celestina Angela Romero. She was seventy-three years old, under five feet tall, and widowed. He sat on a flowery couch underneath another painting of Jesus on a cross, this one scantily clothed. Across a room cluttered with religious knickknacks Celestina sat in a chair and talked to him unceasingly in Spanish, a fraction of which he understood. He rested his hand on his swollen knee and prodded at it carefully. Nothing was broken, but she could deal a hell of a blow. In his mind he phrased and rephrased a way to ask for more water without angering her and then gave up, leaning his head against the couch. His tongue sat in his mouth like a dried cat turd. He got the feeling she didn’t get too many visitors. In fact, he supposed she’d harbor a rabid brown bear, if he’d only sit and hear her out.

As dusk began to darken, the house the lights came on. Celestina got up and motioned for him to follow, which he did with great pain. Along the way she pointed out the house’s salient features in Spanish. One window featured a view of an outhouse in the backyard. They passed a kitchen he hungered to rip through for whatever rations remained. Halfway down a hall she stopped and motioned for him to enter a room. Inside was a tidy, spare bedroom with a twin-sized mattress. She gestured insistently. He was too tired to argue.

“Gracias, Doña.” He nodded. He closed the door behind him, killed the lights and was asleep shortly after.

In the morning, his knee was improved but he walked with a hobble. She fed him at the table like he was an errant son who’d returned after many years. He wolfed down several corn-sweet breads she worked up during the short power-on, and then she listed through the tasks that needed doing, and like that errant son, he obeyed. He patched up a broken window with cardboard and Elmer’s glue, dry-dusted everything over five feet high, including the tops of the Jesus paintings, hauled trash from the basement that had sat for some decades, and, in the remaining bits of daylight, re-affixed the ailing door to the outhouse. He didn’t know what the fuck he was doing.

It was there on the inside of the outhouse door that he found side-by-side artistic renderings of the Mother Mary and Maid Marian. He sat over the shit hole, attempting the impossible, for he was no match against the vengeance his intestine wreaked on him, and spent a few moments inspecting them. The one with the halo, the other with her gritty rebel hue. The rendering made her pretty, he admitted. With her twin braids lying across each shoulder, her vague Hispanicness, dark eyes and large eyelashes. He longed to deface her image somehow without evoking the suspicions of Celestina. He drew his thumbnail across her neck so that a crease was made there. “On guard, puta.”

She glared back at him, righteous, and he swore. Enough motherfucking dallying. It was a toxic oven in the outhouse. The weather had turned vicious hot. He finished the outhouse door with muscular irritation and then stomped back through the house, favoring his good leg. Celestina picked up his trail, clutching a handful of lightbulbs, doling out his next chores. But he had made up his mind. He grabbed the baseball bat from where it leaned under Jesus and walked into the dusk toward Sherwood headquarters. He was going to take care of this bullshit right now.

She’d taken his home, shot him through the head, and killed his cousin Fred. He tested the bat and found he could wield it like a spry stick, the anger giving him strength.

The air outside had the smell of an approaching dust storm. There was an electric nosebleed burn to the dryness, and static shocks bit his finger when he grazed his hand along a chain-link fence. Martin clasped the bat to his bad-knee leg so that in profile it would not be noticed and limped toward headquarters. There were many blocks to walk, and he began to grunt in pain with each step.

Two blocks in, a fellow who stood in the middle of the street called out to him. A Ranger, he saw now, as he drifted closer. The man had called him “countryman” and had asked him to state his business.

“Ahoy, countryman,” Martin said cheerfully as he approached, and then Martin socked him in the balls with his bat.

The Ranger collapsed to the ground, wheezing an unintelligible retort. And then Martin saw him start futzing around with a light, and so Martin hit him again, somehow missing his head and hitting him on the shoulder.

Martin stepped on the Ranger’s hand that held the light. Looking down the line of sight, he saw a far-off light reply and realized the alarm was sprung. Martin snatched the light and frantically blipped the button on the little gizmo back toward where the light was coming from, hoping he’d sent some kind of message back.

“You little bastard, what am I going to do now?” Martin spotted the Ranger’s bike leaning against a stop sign. He tenderly threw his bad leg over the seat and then pedaled into dark. He returned the way he’d come, wary that at any moment Rangers might come pouring from the night like in some third-rate horror movie.

Back at Celestina’s he stashed the bike behind the outhouse. Then he put the baseball bat back where Jesus could watch it. In the quiet, dark kitchen, he fumbled onto a small plate of food she’d left for him. It was still warm. He had done enough damage tonight, he thought, and chuckled to himself about the poor bastard he’d left in the street. He would be more careful next time. He pulled out his new Ranger light, a little LED thing, and scanned it over the food. Sweet breads and beans. He could kiss her. She was the most wonderful woman in the world.