Sherwood Nation (2 page)

Nearly a year ago, when the tap dried up and water service ceased, the city council created the Portland Water Act, declaring water to be a city-owned resource of which every citizen would get equal distribution. But as far as she could tell, while the rich swam in their fountains, kids in Northeast Portland wandered about in a dehydrated daze, the last of the city’s trees died, and moose committed suicide. 

Bea was asleep. She edged her roommate’s door open and stared in, trying to decide whether to tell her where she was going. Bea looked peaceful in sleep, issuing a soft snore, a sort of gorilla-hum. Her brownish-red hair curled in a knotted mass around her face and her big feet hung over the end of the bed, uncovered. Though it was warm enough, Renee slipped in and quietly tucked the sheet over them.

In her room Renee sat on her bed and rotated her metal unit gallon in her hands, letting the water slosh about inside. She had a little time to kill, but it was the sort of time that could not be used. Time that sent an incapaciting buzz through one’s brain, keeping her from performing simple tasks. There was less than a quart left in the container. She took a swig and then confirmed the amount on the digital readout: 6.4 units remained, out of the forty. The city issued the unit gallons, which measured a gallon into forty smaller units, under the premise:
That which is measured, improves.
The expression was affixed to the side via a cheerful green sticker, with a tired-looking smiley face at the end of it. She felt she remembered Zach had had a hand in the campaign. 

She wished she could tell her parents. But even if she could find a way to get a call through to the other side of the Rocky Mountains, to whatever humble abode they might be residing in, eking out some living or scraping by on savings in order to buy their daily allotment of alcohol, she thought she knew exactly how the conversation might go:

“Hi Mom, it’s Renee.”

“Oh!” There would be the sound of a long exhale of smoke, as if her mother had inhaled a dragon’s lungful of tobacco before answering the phone. “Renee.”

A silence would persist for a few seconds as both considered what they might have to tell each other. 

“I went to a water activists meeting, really cool people. We’re going to do an action today to make a statement about water issues. I’m going to help stop a contraband truck.”

“What?” her mother would say, the English deeply accented by her native Spanish. “What about your degree?”

Her mother always brought up her degree, as if it were a panacea for everything that irked her about her daughter’s personality. Renee was the only one in the family to receive one. But to her mother’s horror, she’d graduated with a degree in history, or as she’d once called it:
a degree in the dead.

Then, as she tried to make the water activists sound compelling for her mother, the words would get a little lost in her mouth. The making of her own life interesting to her mother was a task she’d had very little luck with throughout her childhood. The more she explained, the more preposterous it would sound. A noise or two might issue from her mother, indicating her continued, but mostly bored, presence on the end of the line. Renee could see her: in her gray sweatsuit, the phone squeezed between her shoulder and ear, a glass of gin in one hand while with the other she pried off chips of paint from the wall with a long thumbnail. In the background, the dramatic monotony of Mexican telenovelas. And then her mother would say, by way of ending the conversation: Your father will want to know.

Her father, Renee thought,
would
want to know. She would love to tell him, but there was the difficulty of encountering him in a moment of coherence. When Renee’s mother yelled for her father, down several flights of stairs, he would pick up his phone off the table saw, where it sat in a pile of sawdust and red wine splatter. Her parents undertook their lives on different floors of the house, him in the basement, her on the second floor, each speaking their own accents, Mexican and Polish, each living partly in the worlds from which they’d come, meeting only rarely in the middle for meals or to exit the house, or most rarely of all, when a sudden berserk passion flared up between them. Around her father were hundreds of dark, metal-worn tools, the signs of a constant, if somewhat ineffectual, tinkerer. In polar opposition to the woman two floors above, he would answer boisterously, sounding thrilled to hear from her, his words slushing from his mouth with great speed, sentences released in one order and then swallowed back and thrust out in a different order. He would listen to her deeply for a minute or two, then list back to her the details, asking questions that she’d answered, as if the conversation were going in reverse. It would make him happy, and then angry on her behalf, and then happy all over again, and then, inevitably, he would gather himself up, swell his lungs for delivery of a monstrous speech about his own comparable moment.

Her father had been a whistleblower. He had outed the Roswell Basin aquifer contamination. This was something he had done, the moment his life had ascended to, and the moment from which his life declined since. She’d listened to this same heady story a hundred times, thrilled, as a child, when the hero in the story, her father, fought and prevailed. He’d gone on the news, he’d testified to Congress, he was backed by scientists, and he’d won. Yet somehow it had ruined him, as if he’d mastered some great game that no one else knew how to play. What was left for him afterwards? What compared to the heroic moment he’d had? He glimpsed, for a moment, ascending permanently out of mediocrity. For the first time he believed in the possibility of being a superman.

In the end, there was no way to contact either one of them.

She was late to the meeting. The water activists were still exotic enough to be a little intimidating, a rough lot with histories of political action and arrests. There were three of them. Josh had recruited her—he was tall and thin and easy in his movement. He smiled her in and gestured for her to sit at the kitchen table, where they’d gathered. In a protest some years back, he had been beaten by the police. The resulting settlement had won him some money and fame. Even how he was dressed, with a dusty bandana around his neck ready to pull up over his nose, a ski cap and an unkempt beard, it was hard not to feel a pull of attraction.

The others at the table, Janey and Davis, were pissed at him for changing plans at “zero hour.”

Renee watched them argue. Josh was the loudest thing in the room, and she wrestled with his simultaneous attractiveness and bull-headedness. He won his fights because he outlasted everyone else.

“Dude,” Davis said. “What’s a month of planning for if you change the plan on the day of?”

Josh shrugged and smiled broadly. “Because it’s a better plan? What’s a brain for if you can’t adapt to a better outcome now and then?”

They were all nervous, and every time she became conscious of her own breath she had to work to slow it down again. She wished they could leave now. She wondered if this is what it felt like before battle, if her father had felt this way. There was a vibration in her guts that would not stop. To do something with her hands, she pulled a piece of scratch paper from the center of the table and folded it into a paper boat.

While Davis and Josh argued, Janey poured Renee a shot glass of water from her own unit gallon. “Ready?” 

Renee sailed her boat across the table and left it in front of Janey. She had been asked this often but did not blame them. She was the newest and least experienced, the potential weak link. But Renee could feel her readiness, a coiled spring of it.

“She was born ready,” Josh snapped. “I picked her, I know what I’m doing.”

Renee frowned and shrugged. “Think so,” she said. “Yes I am.”

Janey squeezed her arm. “Good. You’re pretty key, here.”

Davis waved his hand in Josh’s direction to end their argument. “We’ll see who’s right in the outcome, friend.” He looked about at Janey and Renee. “KATU news knows to be there,” he said. “Everybody have their flyers?”

Renee pulled a hand-printed flyer from the center of the table. It read:

Who are the thieves
?
 

This truck carries unmarked

water to the West Hills!

The Portland Water Act is a sham!

She thought Josh must have written it; a wordsmith he was not. 

He pointed at her. “Speak through your part again.” 

She clutched the flyer, closed her eyes, and narrated her way through each action. As she did, she visualized it, every minute detail. She had practiced it constantly. It was automatic.

He nodded when she was done. “That was perfect,” he said.

“No one will go thirsty,” declared Mayor Brandon Bartlett into the nightly news camera. It made the mayor feel good to say this. He was handling things, he was taking charge. The agenda was on hold—that was OK. If just for once he didn’t have to deliver bad news. He stared into the camera and smiled.

“W
e will all have to make sacrifices,” he said, a political suicide of a line, but this was no campaign. He had just told them that water rations would be decreased to one gallon per day per person, and he expected the worst. He stood next to the weatherman, in front of the forecast, which showed an endless timeline of hot, rainless days. He wondered if he should put his arm around the guy, with his shiny hair and slick suit and handsome chin. As if to say:
See? I’m a friend of the weather myself
.
Rain could come at any time.

A million gallons per day was distributed out to the city, one sixtieth of what had once traveled through the pipes. On Monday he’d lost forty thousand gallons in a fire in the Pearl district, and another eighteen thousand the following day. Bled out of their reserves reluctantly, letting buildings burn that could not be saved.

They played Patel & Grummus’s new
prime the slime
water-saving jingle while an attractive woman demonstrated the amount. The whole thing made him squeamish and honestly, he couldn’t imagine how anyone could portion off enough water from the ration to expel any waste from the bone-dry plumbing. But where else were they going to put it?

The city had enough water on hand to last for three more months with the new rationing. “Measures are being taken to secure water imports from Russia and New Zealand. Our city is in better shape than nearly any other remaining Western city.” Except Seattle, he thought, envying their city-side desalinization plant. Still, everyone’s first thought was the violence there, how the Emerald City was essentially in a state of civil war. Of San Francisco, with their power infrastructure destroyed, it was nearly impossible to get any reliable information. After the fires and subsequent takeover by a rogue branch of the National Guard they had gone dark. Or had the fires come after? Everything south of San Francisco was essentially abandoned.

“
We ask that you stay calm,” the mayor said. “We’re Portlanders, right? We have thrived in prosperity, and we can endure hardship. To those who may feel the need to secure quantities of water, by whatever means, I ask you to have trust. Trust in your government, trust in me. We will provide. We will help each other get through. No one will go thirsty.” He nodded to the weatherman, smiled, then exited the studio and got into the back of a Lincoln Town Car where Christopher awaited him. He’d stopped appearing anywhere where someone could ask him a question. Otherwise, the crowds lasted thirty seconds before the anger turned to jostling, or hecklers shot-gunned him with questions about hospitals and the police and reservoirs and desalinization plants and government water usage and imports and fuck all.

When the mayor returned home—or rather to his city hall office, which he and Christopher had taken to living in, for the view and the safety, but also because the work was never-ending—he paced around the conference room. He felt sick-hearted at the new restrictions he’d announced, and aggravated at the new reports of water robberies. He stared out into the view of the city. “Can’t they all just stay the fuck calm?”

Christopher grimaced. Staying calm was not the people’s job, he was fairly certain. It was the mayor’s job. But he declined to mention this.

“
Between the city council, the citizens, the news, and the fucking National Guard, it’s like four piranhas in a fish tank.”

“
Eating you?”

“
Yeah, eating me!” The mayor very much would have liked to put his fist through the sliding glass door to their balcony, but it was difficult to get replacement anything at the moment and so he reconsidered. It was city property, he was sure he’d be reminded.

“
I’m not sure a fish tank is an apt metaphor,” Christopher said.

The mayor turned angrily to glare at him, his finger pointing, ready to pound out a couple of points on Christopher’s chest and then he stopped himself.

“
Oh Jesus Chrissy, I’m sorry,” he said and exhaled and turned back to the window. “OK, terrarium. Is that better? Piranhas in a terrarium. That’s exactly it.”

Renee rode her bicycle between taxicabs and clipped a
mirror on a big yellow, jarring it out of whack. There was yelling and honking and she heard the distinctive sound of being chased by someone who had no business running, but she had no time to slow down. She gripped the metal rod she kept holstered to her handlebars just in case. The cars were trapped in traffic. There were far fewer cars, but the lack of traffic lights made driving a constant agony. If you wanted to get somewhere, you rode.