Zach lay on his back amid the dried ruins of his rooftop vegetable garden and stared at the wispy clouds passing overhead. They were like great ships passing by, refusing to stop at their lonely port. They danced about up there, the tendrils of water vapor curling about in the atmosphere, doing their own rain dance.
It was vexing to watch all that water pass by above. What need did the sky have while the land went without? Perhaps they were simply a victim in someone else’s war, a feud between the earth and sky.
On the street he heard a couple of quick gunshots in succession and his hair prickled and he thought of Renee.
He watched the cloud dissipate. In order to function, he thought, in order not to come entirely undone, you need to have faith that the Earth will not stop spinning. That the sun will not quit. That gravity will hold you down. You stake your existence on their working. You rely on those around you to believe that the cash you hold in your hand is worth more than just the paper. You become used to running water, and electricity, you base your existence on the premise that there will be air to breathe, night to sleep by, and water to drink.
He felt he understood how civilizations of the past might have believed they’d angered their gods when a system failed that was beyond their understanding. You cannot remove the foundation from a house and expect the house to stand. How far away were they from sacrificing their own virgins? Certainly, he thought, we’re all asking the gods: Why? Why this, why now, why us?
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.
Zach felt a hollow fear bang around his insides and knew it was time for distribution. Every morning contained a growing thirst and an expectation of that fear. He missed Sherwood. He had been at his house too short of a time and had no savings. With the two of them, he and his patient, to look after now, he could not afford any mistakes.
When the time came and his tongue felt coated in ash he tucked a knife—a small but easily opened blade—into his pocket and set off with his unit gallon. He watched his neighbors walk toward the same destination like wolves toward a kill, and he stayed close in with them, familiars by sight. Most of them were in groups, and he knew that those who walked alone were not to be trusted. In times like these, people who have the disposition band together and watch each other’s backs.
The day was burdensomely hot and the heat pressed on him, made each footfall toward his destination feel like a herculean extra effort. There was no cloud in the sky, just a mammoth bowl of blue sky that crushed down on them. As the temperature had increased over the last week, his skin had dried up, so that the subtlest of facial expressions caused his lips to crack and bleed.
Distribution was at Oregon Park, a few blocks from his place. The truck was already there, white and bulbous, like an egg waiting to be cracked, darkened by dust and the grease of human hands that reached up to touch its cool belly. He stood in a line that wound its way along
the dusty park, its once great trees all cut down in the winter previous. There were patterns rutted deep into the ground for this daily ritual they all performed. The standing in line, the truck parked in the same spot, the National Guardsmen roving their eyes back and forth across the lot of them.
After a long wait Zach made it to the front. There were some moments of confusion as the guard checked his identification with its water code and noticed that he’d had his card registered in Sherwood recently. Zach responded quietly that he’d moved out of Sherwood, as he’d explained many times already, and he could feel those behind him lean in to listen. When he was cleared he hooked the nozzle into the top socket of his unit gallon and heard the relieving sound of it being filled. But as it came to the top the nozzle sputtered and the tone changed. Behind him someone yelled and he quickly disconnected his gallon. The truck was out of water and there were at least a hundred more in line behind him. The murmur of the news made it quickly up and down the line, and the ragged-looking man directly behind him called out in protest.
“That’s enough,” the Guardsman said and held his hand up to calm the crowd behind him.
Zach gripped his bottle to him and eased away from the line as the crowd began to go amorphous, transforming from order to mob. “There’ll be another truck,” the Guardsman yelled out.
“I stood here an hour! An hour!” the man who had been behind him said.
“It will come,” the guardsman said.
“Hey, Sherwooder!” he yelled as Zach retreated. He followed after Zach and then reached in for a hold on Zach’s bottle and for a moment they wrestled it like a football on astroturf, pulling and scratching at each other. The man’s furry, tangled mat of hair was sticky from grime. They fell together and struggled for the prize on the ground and then Zach pulled away enough to get a foot up and kick him. The blow landed in his face and there was a sickening pop. Zach rolled backward and then to his feet and fought a gag reflex. He snatched the bottle from the man’s clutches. “Sorry!” he yelled, catching a last glimpse of him on the ground, his head reared up, blood and dust mingled into his mustache. “Sorry!” Zach turned and ran.
Sherwood Nation Page 31
