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 without 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.
Jose Ramirez
DOB: 04/07/1952
Distribution: Alameda
Last pickup: 9 days ago
A green light pulsed next to his name.
“Whoa,” Renee said. “That one’s good.”
“Fucking right it is.”
“Where do you suppose he is?”
Josh shrugged. “Dead or gone, amigo.” He pulled out another card and scanned again. This time it was a light-skinned girl in her twenties.
Renee shuddered. “Ugh. How did you get these cards again?”
“Could be in jail,” Josh said, “or maybe she left somehow, I don’t know. If you distribute water, you hit this button here and it registers the location and water given out. They do that when we pick up.”
“How do you know this gizmo isn’t sending your coordinates up with the request? We’re not exactly a water distribution here.”
Josh looked at her quizzically and then blanched.
“I mean it’s got the—fucking hell, the location is right there, right? You don’t think they keep track of these scanners?” Renee rose in alarm. “Bea! Get your shit!” She turned to Josh. “Nice one, dipshit.”
“No—there’s no way,” Josh said.
“Of course there is, if they’re missing one they’ll want it back. It’s sending your location. We’re out of here.”
Bea charged down the stairs and Renee instructed her to rouse the house for leaving.
“Josh, turn that fucking thing off.”
“You’re being alarmist.”
“You stay if you want. They don’t even know who you are. ”
They gathered solemnly, called from their various jobs at HQ. “We think there’s a chance someone is going to come looking for us, and because of this,”—she pointed to the scanner—“a water card scanner, every one of us has got to jump ship. This house has to look abandoned and we’ve got to find a place. Ideas?”
“Jeffersons would take us in,” Bea said. They had met the Jeffersons during the burial runs, a small house up the street.
“Good—but not all of us. Julia? You stay there and keep an eye out on HQ. Leroy, you and Chris go with her. Anyone else? I propose the rest of us camp at the water tower park.”
“Ma’am,” Chris said, ducking his head. He pointed to the slatted barrier he’d built over the big broken window that led to the front porch. “If you don’t mind my saying it, this could be caved in for effect and”—he turned red and studied the floor for a moment—“if I were you, well, it’d be effective if someone defecated on the porch. In front of the door. Make it seem like no one lived here, you know.”
Renee nodded. “Brilliant. Thank you, Chris. Everybody else, clear out!”
That night at the water tower Renee wrapped in a sheet and huddled next to Bea on top of the playground structure. Below them the others crowded together to keep warm. The night had turned chilly. Under the sheet, Renee could smell the body sweat and rankness on their clothes, grime and dust and sourness. In this moment hiding atop a playground structure, ejected by fear from their new home, the task of cleaning one’s own body felt monumental.
Josh had apologized, and then he had ridden off with the scanner to test the rest of the cards in transit, to leave a wandering trail for the thing. When he met up with them at the park he announced he had seven working cards.
Despite the news, Renee felt sick-hearted. She wondered if they’d lost their house. She suddenly wearied of fighting back, of feeling like she was in charge, of being on the run; daunted by the work ahead of them. The dust dried the saliva in her mouth and she did not feel like speaking. She wished she could see Zach. She tried to call to him with the green laser but he did not answer, and so she tucked her head into the sheet and wept, but no water came to her eyes.
Late the next afternoon they tentatively returned, collecting Julia from the neighbors on the way. Julia told them she’d wakened to see the police at their house. There were signs of them throughout—the feces on the front porch had been tracked into the house, then back-tracked and scraped off on the edge of the porch, likely with much cursing. Their ruse had worked; it was highly unlikely they’d come back to the same house, and there was hope in that.
Her first official visitor was called Martin Ostrovsky. According to Leroy he traded in drugs and water and gasoline and had half a dozen men working for him. In other words, medium-small fry in the neighborhood bigwig business. He ran his operation about twelve blocks to the east, and theirs, the Sherwood Club, had extended into his area. There were others of these kind that would come to confront her, she thought with anxiety, and ones with a lot more clout.
She stationed Bea at the door of her office, so that she would loom behind whomever was having an audience with her, a big sentry there to intimidate, and she asked the volunteers to make regular foot traffic up and down the hall outside.
Renee stood and offered her hand, making Martin lean deep into the desk to shake. He scowled. He was big and thick with a shiny bald head—a subtle mark of wealth, for to shave a head required wasted water. From his just-visible whisker growth she could see his hair had gone gray. The two henchmen he’d brought in tow she made stay outside the house, and he was not used to being treated this way.
He asked her what she was.
“What have you heard?” Her chair was about eighteen inches higher tha
n his, making it seem as though he was sitting in a child’s chair. It also meant that his head was about the height of her bust, which he kept glancing at, and she wondered if she might need to have her desk adjusted.
“I’ve seen the news and I know Ronny left to come work here, that backstabbing son of a bitch. How much do you pay him?”
“We’re all volunteers.”
He looked surprised and she could see him trying to figure out a business model that kept its employees without pay. “What are you shelling out then? What’s the scoop here?”
She gave him the pitch she’d given others, about neighborhood security and the inequality of the water system. About rebuilding and providing where the city had abandoned them. A network of citizens that looked out for each other. For a moment she heard her father’s voice in her, felt his power and persuasiveness rise up out of her and fill the room. How as she painted the vision she herself became lost in it, said it as if she might suddenly stand on her desk, or put her head down and cry out a spell, feeling her own words and her purpose dig deep into her gut. That by merely saying it made it happen. There was a rightness of it.
His facial muscles were taut, bunched into a grimace of puzzlement. For a moment, she thought, he had bought the vision she wove.
“We’re the neighborhood’s net. We’re its keeper.”
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