Nina, the Bandit Queen (2 page)

To go from being locked in a showdown with an ice cream truck to deciding to rob a bank wasn’t a straight line from A to B. It was more of a process. Some of the other things that went on between Nina and the ice cream truck that morning were also part of the process. So was the urgent need to raise money for local improvements and public works. This had to do with the swimming pool at the high school getting closed down. If she could get it reopened, it would be a good place for her daughters to burn off the aimless youthful energy that might otherwise lead them to become whores and crack addicts. This happened so often in SuEz that whenever it did, nobody was surprised. And then there was how she didn’t approve of stealing. Overcoming that obstacle was part of it, too.

But because she didn’t know anything at all about this process, which is understandable since it was only about to get rolling, and because she definitely had no idea that she was on the brink of getting swept up in it, when D.S. Dolgoy came out on the porch and saw her eyeball-to-eyeball with the ice cream truck in the middle of the street in front of their house and said, “What’re you doing?” she didn’t find it very helpful.

It didn’t lead her to give a little more thought to whatever it was she wasn’t aware she was doing. It didn’t throw a bucket of cold, clear reasonableness over her. It didn’t, because she knew that when he said, “What’re you doing?” it wasn’t D.S. asking a question. It was D.S. telling her, “Get the fuck off the street and stop making a fool of yourself.”

More to the point, she also knew that by “yourself,” he meant she was making a fool of him.

So there she was, not doing anything she was even aware of except being pissed off. And then she got told to stop doing it because it was embarrassing
him
. That was the thing that
really
pissed her off.

Fuck you, D.S.

She didn’t say it out loud, though, because children were present. At least he had the blond wig on the right way around. He looked ridiculous on the porch in it and her green nightie, which was a version of the disguise he’d come up with so the welfare inspectors wouldn’t figure out there was a male on the premises. He looked ridiculous in it everywhere, but not nearly as ridiculous as he looked when he got out of bed in a rush and the wig was turned around backwards. That looked idiotic, like he was peeking out through one of those Hawaiian hula dancer’s skirts. It made his daughters laugh until they peed their pants.

One thing she did know for sure was that JannaRose was right behind her. She didn’t even have to look around. Their friendship had reached a stage where she got subconscious signals. She always knew exactly where JannaRose was and what she was doing, the same as she always knew what she was wearing, although that wasn’t difficult. A T-shirt and sweats. They used to joke about these psychic powers of Nina’s. “Okay, how many orgasms did I have last night?” JannaRose would ask. “You mean real ones?” Nina would answer. It would start them laughing until they had to hold each other up.

“Stay right there.” Nina barely glanced around.

“What?”

“Don’t move.” Whether she’d done it consciously or not, JannaRose had drifted out into the middle of the street, and if she stayed right where she was, the truck was still blocked. Nina ran up the steps and yanked D.S.’s crutch out from under his arm. He didn’t particularly need it, since he was almost totally healed from the last time a customer beat him up, but he kept it around since he usually needed it several times a year. And even when he didn’t — when something happened that made him nervous, he leaned on it.

“What?” D.S. said, stumbling around. The girls shuffled to stay out of his way, something that wasn’t all that easy with everybody already sticking out over the edges of the porch. But they managed to do it without taking their eyes off the truck, which — it was obvious from the expressions on their faces — they knew was going to do something impossibly fabulous any second now, something far more fabulous than anything they had ever dared to dream of. They didn’t look as if they would survive the wait.

When Nina dashed back into the road holding the crutch near the bottom like it was an axe, it didn’t get through to her children that something else was going to happen instead. It didn’t even get through to them when she hauled the crutch back over her shoulder as if she was about to take a big swing at the windshield right in front of the driver. He was the only one who reacted in any way at all.

“Hey!” he said, in his amplified twelve-year-old voice, although now that Nina was getting a closer look, he seemed even younger.

“Get out of here,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“Go on. I’m counting to three.” She took a practice chop, swinging until the armpit-end of the crutch nearly touched the glass.

That was when something finally got through to the girls, something impossibly horrible, far more horrible than anything else would ever be in their whole lives. They squealed in agony. “What’s she doing?”

“What’re you doing?” It was D.S. again, only this time it really was a question. He was getting nervous, and she had his crutch out there when he needed it more than he ever had before.

The kid leaned his head out the side window. “I can’t hear what you’re saying,” he said.

Nina hauled the crutch back. “I said” — each word came out like it was a rock and she was heaving them to him one at a time — “get your truck off of this street.”

This seemed definitely okay with the kid. It was as if he’d already decided that this miserable street in the worst part of town wasn’t a place where he wanted to get into a big dispute. “You’ll have to get out of the way, then,” he said.

Nina rested the crutch on her shoulder. “Nope.”

“Huh?”

“Turn around.” She made a twirly motion with her finger.

The kid studied the situation in his mirrors. “There isn’t room.”

“Then back up.”

The driver was really young, and a complete stranger, and didn’t appear the slightest bit sure of himself, but that wasn’t what made it unusual. What made it unusual was that Nina had never gotten right in
anybody’s
face before, never gone full-tilt at anyone, if you don’t count D.S., and that was like going full-tilt at a baggie of Jell-O. Later on she told JannaRose that through it all, she never had any idea of where what she did next or where what she said came from. She was as amazed as everybody by everything that happened. And at that moment, after she told the kid he was going to have to back out of there, she felt as if she was in one of those scenes she’d seen in movies where everything suddenly freezes. Where nobody can move at all.

Until — she was so startled, she jumped, everybody did — some guy came out of nowhere and slipped up beside her. He was wearing a grey plastic windbreaker zipped all the way up and his pants were so wrinkly and bunched they didn’t even reach down as far as his socks. She’d never seen him before, that she could remember, even though it turned out he was the welfare inspector who put the ladder up every night and spied on her through the little clear spot he’d rubbed on the window to see if she had a man on the premises.

“We know what you’re up to,” he sneered in a menacing whisper. Her eyes popped wide open as she tried to figure out what was going on. “But it won’t work. So,” he sneered, “you can just forget it.” And he ran away, scrunching his shoulders around his ears so nobody would recognize him.

“Who the hell was that?” D.S. shouted.

“Why don’t you shut up?” she shouted back. “I’m busy.”

The ice cream kid sounded like he didn’t know what to do. With cars parked on both sides, barely one whole lane was open. “Back up?” he said.

“Bet you could take out one of the headlights.” Whenever JannaRose got the feeling that things were going to spin out of her grasp, she tried to tone them down, so it was entirely understandable that she would suggest a moderate alternative.

Nina knew what she was getting at, but it went right past D.S. “Don’t you encourage her,” he yelled.

“Uh-uh,” Nina told JannaRose.

“What’d she say?” D.S. shouted.

What she’d said was all JannaRose needed to hear to understand that this wasn’t some spur-of-the-moment, completely out-of-her-freaking-mind moment. That Nina wasn’t held in a death grip by some irrational, violent impulse. What she’d said was
Why settle for the two dollars you find on the sidewalk when you can use it to buy a lottery ticket and go for all the millions?
“Okay,” JannaRose said, sounding as if she was passing every single ounce of faith she had over to her friend, and moving out of the way.

Nina hauled the crutch back again. She hauled it back farther. She hauled it back as far as she could.

D.S. groaned. But the possibility that he might do anything more than that, already slight since having his neighbours see him wearing the wig and nightie always made him worry that they might not take him as seriously as they should, became absolute zero when the man who’d snuck up beside Nina and whispered to her appeared beside the porch.

“We don’t like lesbos, either,” he sneered as D.S. gaped at him uncomprehendingly. “Just because there’s nothing in the law about lesbos sharing a residence with a welfare recipient doesn’t mean we like them.” The way he wrote in his notebook made D.S. think he was trying to stab it to death with his ballpoint. “We don’t like them,” he hissed, and giving D.S. a menacing glare, he scampered away.

Nina clenched her teeth. She waggled the crutch. She took a deep breath. She rose way up on one toe. She squeezed one eye into a slit and took dead aim at the exact spot where the kid’s nose was behind the glass.

D.S. groaned louder.

She focused every particle of her being. And swung as hard as she could.

She spun around so wildly, she landed on her butt. She’d spun around because she missed the windshield. She missed the windshield because the truck was no longer in range.

It was backing up.

It swerved one way then another, collecting side mirrors from parked cars. She wasn’t surprised. She’d figured the kid was driving it for the first time that morning. It looked as if it was the first time he’d had it in reverse.

The girls came down from the porch looking so hurt that she told them they made her feel like she’d used the crutch to beat their new puppy to death. Since they’d never had a puppy, or a pet of any kind, she said it in the hopes of giving them the kind of emotional perspective that would help them deal with the far more despicable thing they’d seen her do. But they made it clear she was wasting her breath. Her shoulders sagged. Behind her, down the street where she’d kept the truck from going, there were nasty shouts. Harsh adult voices started rising above the tear-filled wails of children. The voices shouted “Ignorant bitch!” and “Mind your own business, you cunt!”

JannaRose gave them the finger, then seeing Nina making her way sadly between parked cars, hurried after her. “What was that all about?” she said.

“They” — Nina’s shoulders sagged even more. “Their kids … I guess they really wanted them to hear their names called out.”

“No.
All
that stuff. With the truck and the crutch and everything.”

“Yeah!” D.S. was scowling. “What the fuck was that all about?”

Nina rounded on him. “You watch your language, D.S.,” she said and began herding the girls into the house with little flaps of her arms.

“Tired?” JannaRose said, plopping down on the step beside Nina. It was the next morning.

“No!”

“You were asleep.”

“No, no. I was trying not to sweat. I was concentrating.” Nina opened her eyes so wide they bugged out. “But I keep falling asleep.”

Nina had gotten out of bed long before the electric tootles and personalized sales pitches to the little children could be heard. She’d sat outside and let her anger pump up like another set of lungs. Now, here was the truck, almost on top of her.

“Aw, shit.” Knots of kids pressed right out on the road, hardly able to wait for it to stop. Every one held up a fist stuffed with money.

Her front door opened and the three biggest girls came out. A weird creature with four legs and two heads teetered across from Zanielle’s house: it was Fabreece and Zanielle, still Velcroed together. When the truck called Zanielle’s name out along with the names of her two brothers, the mix of pure happiness and despair on her face made Nina’s insides clench. “That’s you!” Fabreece said in wonderment, and they tightened their holds on each other.

JannaRose spoke sharply. “You stay right there!” She pointed across at the three kids who had tumbled out on her step. “I’m warning you!”

“Mom?” Merlina said.

“No,” Nina told her, without looking around.

Then the truck spoke to them. To Guinevere and Merlina and Lady and Fabreece. And to JannaRose’s Jewell and Eddie Jr. and Tyrone. It said they were missing out on some really delicious things, things they would absolutely love. Things other kids would give anything to taste. Their favourites.

JannaRose whipped across the street and grabbed her three in a bear hug.

“Mom?”

“You heard me the first time,” Nina said. Today there were two people in the truck. Somebody was in the passenger seat and they didn’t move from it when the driver went to the side counter to handle business.

“He’s got backup,” JannaRose shouted, trying to keep hold of her armful.

The truck drifted slowly past. Really slowly. The passenger was holding a baseball bat. The driver brandished one of his own. They both kept their eyes on Nina.

“Jesus,” she said.

“They’re wearing, like, football helmets.” JannaRose sounded as if it was the most amazing thing ever. “You see that?”

Not even Nina could say exactly when the idea of robbing a bank came to her, but it looks as if it was introduced into the process when the subject of robbing banks started coming up all the time in conversation. This happened after she concluded that the only way to stop the direct-sales ice cream truck permanently would be to organize an attack on the lot where the trucks were parked overnight. This would teach the ice cream company a lesson about the economic situation in SuEz in general, and in her house in particular.

She never passed up a chance to teach economic lessons along this line, although this was the first time it had occurred to her to reach beyond her immediate family and JannaRose, who usually didn’t mind as much as her children. It was hard to say which of her daughters was the whiniest, Guinevere or Merlina. But they whined in different ways. Gwinny whined about how everything that happened in the world was designed to ruin her life. Merly whined about things that Nina would have liked to do something about if she possibly could. She had no idea where to begin when it came to setting Gwinny straight, but with Merly she waded right in.

“We don’t have any money,” she said when Merly asked why they couldn’t at least once buy some things the ice cream company made exclusively for them.

“You always have a bit,” Merly said.

“But every day I somehow —”

“A little bit.”

“ — every day I somehow manage to come up with something for you to eat.”

“Today the truck is like, ‘Merlina, too bad you can’t have this fabulous Pecan Frosted Freeze-O-Reeno.’ That would have made me happy. You never think about making me happy.”

“I don’t want you to starve and get sick. So today I’ll find something else for you and for your sisters.”

“Who cares about them?”

“We all do.”

“Fuckin’ assholes.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“What did you just say?”

“Nothing.”

Not that worrying about Guinevere didn’t take up a lot of her time. Mainly it was because Gwinny lived so much in a dream world, even if her dreams kept bumping into the plain facts of SuEz, that it started Nina thinking about how, if the school pool was opened for kids in the summer, a lot of excess and dangerous energy could get burned off. But when she tried to talk to the authorities about it, they pointed out that the reason the pool wasn’t open the rest of the year either was that the filtration system and the heater and those kinds of things were so old and worn out that they didn’t work. Or they worked, but not up to the required standards, and had been condemned by the health department.

Things did start to happen, though. Immediately after Nina raised the subject, the pool’s windows and doors got boarded up. And that night somebody stole the boards. Then the windows got stolen, and the doors, and more boards got put over the openings, and those boards got stolen. All the stuff inside got stolen: the lifeguard’s tall chair, the safety equipment, the benches, the folding bleachers, the scoreboard from when there had been swim meets, the clock-timers, the glass out of the pool office window, the office furniture. Then the heating equipment and the filtration system. Those were substantial items. Nobody could just walk away with them. It was after the big ventilators got stolen off the roof that the windows and doors got bricked up, and this was why whoever stole the water had to smash their way through with a sledgehammer.

The ice cream truck was starting to insult the girls personally. They were getting bored and crabby and it wasn’t even summer yet. Guinevere was already fourteen, and the word was that lots of girls that age, although if it was girls everywhere or just in SuEz wasn’t clear — anyway, Nina heard they gave out blowjobs like she didn’t know what.

She was talking about this to JannaRose, about how she’d sat Gwinny down. “And I told her that oral you-knows would —”

“Oral you-knows?”

“Oral you-knows. It’s not easy to come out and say some things to your fourteen-year-old daughter.”

“What’d she say?”

“She said, ‘You mean blowjobs?’”

“My goodness,” JannaRose said.

“Fuck you, too,” Nina replied.

“At least they’re better than getting knocked up.”

“No! Yes! No, I’d just rather she … why can’t … that she —”

“Good luck,” JannaRose said.

“So you know what she said then? She said, ‘At least with blowjobs you don’t get pregnant.’”

“I cannot believe it.”

“The point is,” Nina said, not wanting JannaRose to get the impression she was a moron, “if somebody started giving blowjobs all over the place, guys would get really interested and start taking her here and there. And the next thing anybody knew, she’d be up in the towers working for a living.” So many apartments in the towers were empty and had been taken over by drug dealers and whores that she sometimes doubted there were any that people just lived in.

“You think it might be a nutrition thing?” JannaRose said. “If all we give our kids to eat is potato chips, it might not be the thing they need to grow up to be astronauts.”

Nina stared at her for a long time, but JannaRose was looking down, trying to smooth her T-shirt over her stomach, and didn’t notice. Finally, Nina gave up. “So,” she said, “it would probably be good to find something to keep her mind off it.”

JannaRose wasn’t entirely distracted, though. “Like swimming?” she said.

Nina bristled. “You don’t have to say it like that.”

“I didn’t say it like anything.” JannaRose’s voice took on a flinty edge. “I just said it.”

Nina let it drop. It wasn’t that she didn’t realize that maybe it wasn’t the ideal solution. She realized it wasn’t whenever she said it to herself. Even when she said it to herself, it sounded like she was a moron.

Ed Oataway never did understand why his family car had featured so prominently in whatever happened with JannaRose and Dipshit Dolgoy’s idiot wife at the lot where the ice cream company parked its trucks. In fact, he’d never managed to figure out anything about what went on down there, and nobody was about to tell him. It was the same with D.S. Even Nina had eventually realized that the thing she herself originally thought was the point didn’t cover everything that actually happened that night. Not when she added it all together. And to be perfectly honest, she really hadn’t expected to accomplish anything. What she’d expected was the same as she expected with everything she ever did before: not much. There hadn’t been a day in her life when it occurred to her to expect very much of anything, and nothing had come along to cause her to think otherwise. Then here, by accident, she’d driven off toward the ice cream company, and what happened turned out to be as far from not accomplishing anything as was possible. It was so different from everything else she’d ever done that it got her started examining a lot of things about her life that up till then she’d thought were basically no use at all.

What happened in the ice cream company parking lot wasn’t really very hard to describe. On the other hand, it was terrifyingly complicated.

What happened was, she created an absolute shitstorm.

Ed Oataway’s family car was complicated enough to begin with. Ed had refined his trade to where he only stole cars from people who paid to have them stolen. They did this for insurance purposes. He liked the work. There was no competition, and obviously no one was interested in calling the cops in the middle of one of his daring daylight vehicular extractions, as he called them. This meant stress was non-existent. He collected a percentage of what the individual whose car he stole paid for the job, and he held on to the car until what he referred to as the parent organization hauled it away, he figured, for the international junk trade. It was a nice little business. And it was because of the stresslessness that he’d started considering whichever of these cars happened to be waiting for trans-shipment in front of his house to be the Oataway family car. So he didn’t mind if JannaRose used it to go buy potato chips for the kids’ supper. Neither did he mind if she got Nina to drive for her, since JannaRose didn’t have a licence and got nervous driving a car with such imprecise ownership.

The one available for the assault on the ice cream company was an old brown Pontiac that was in such terrible shape, it wouldn’t even begin to turn until the steering wheel got cranked a quarter of the way around. Nina said just keeping it in a straight line was like wrestling with somebody who was having a shit fit. All the way to the ice cream factory she kept wanting to grab JannaRose by the arm and yell,
“Why would anybody steal this fuckin’ thing?”
What kept her from doing it was that JannaRose was already so spooked by the feeling that something awful was going to happen that it would have really upset her. When Nina considered how nervous she was herself, she didn’t want to push things any farther than she secretly planned to push them.

“What are you doing?” JannaRose’s voice sounded quavery as they passed the parking lot full of ice cream trucks for the second time.

“I told you. Looking.” Nina hauled this way and that on the steering wheel and bounced off the curb a couple of times when she finally pulled over. She got out and tried the gate. It didn’t budge. Back in the car, she glared at the fence.

“I was just thinking,” JannaRose said.

Nina glared at JannaRose.

“I was just,” JannaRose said again, “thinking that here, wherever we are, in some part of town we’ve never been before — that if something happened. And we got killed and they stole all our stuff. How will anybody know it’s our bodies?”

Nina glared at the fence.

“They sometimes use dental records, don’t they?” JannaRose said. “I saw it on television.”

That was when Nina decided that for sure it wasn’t a scouting expedition. They were going to go ahead and do it. They might never get another chance.

“But,” JannaRose said, “if you haven’t been to the dentist in — I don’t know. I went once when I was little. One came to the school and looked at our teeth. She was a lady dentist. But,” she said, “what good will that do? I bet she didn’t even keep records.”

Nina decided something else, too. If they were going to do it, they better do it quick. JannaRose was getting freaky. Any minute she was going to start babbling about never seeing her kids again. About how she hadn’t kissed them goodbye.

“When was the last time you did?” JannaRose said.

“What?”

“Went to a dentist.”

“
I don’t know, goddamn it!
”

But she didn’t say it. Not like that. JannaRose would have blown to pieces right on the spot.

“I don’t know,” she whispered. She had to. It was the only way she could keep her voice under control.

For awhile they sat in silence. JannaRose thought they were both thinking about teeth, so it shocked her when Nina hammered her fist on the steering wheel and put the shift in drive.

“
Now
what’re you doing?”

Getting into that parking lot. She almost felt as if she had nothing to do with whatever was going to happen from here on. There wasn’t any actual plan. No Step One leading to Step Two leading to … Kaboom! Once again, some power way down inside her, so deep she’d only just discovered it, was in control. A force more potent than anything she’d ever known. She was perfectly capable of making herself stop breathing, except as soon as she stopped thinking about not breathing, she started breathing again. But she was doing this without thinking even slightly. Like she was just part of what was happening. If she didn’t do it, it would be as if she held her breath for so long that she died. And that was impossible.

“Why are you crashing into the gate?”

She wasn’t crashing into it. She was pushing it open.

The gate was built to swing open like a door, but the padlock refused to give. “Holy shit!” JannaRose watched the nose of the car press against the chain link. She watched the chain link stretch the way a balloon does when you press your finger into it. The frame of the gate started bending. “Holy shit!”

JannaRose’s voice sounded like it was a long way away. Nina dropped the shift into low and stomped on the gas.

The chain link just kept on bulging. Then the balloon burst. “Holy shit!” The car jumped forward. Metal fenceposts ripped out of the ground. The gate slumped flat under the Pontiac. Long sections of fence came down on either side, and the car screeched. Bucked.
Jerked
to a stop. Nina floored it. It wouldn’t back up, either. She tried rocking it, forward, back. The engine roared, metal squealed, otherwise nothing. It wasn’t going to move.

“Aw, for fuck’s sakes,” she said.

“Holy shit!” JannaRose kept saying it, over and over.

Nina opened the door and leaned way out, trying to see underneath. It was hard to do. Broken strands of chain link fencing grabbed at her hair, scratched her face. It was this wire, combined with jackknifed pieces of the fence’s frame, that had grabbed the bottom of the car. Other strands wrapped around the wheels, the axles, the muffler, all the mysterious stuff down there. Every possible thing the wire could get tangled around was held solid, every which way. She couldn’t see any of this, though. The only light in the parking lot was on the wall of the ice cream factory, making it extra dark and shadowy under the car. But if she hadn’t struggled to climb out the door and to stand up — because of the tangle of twisty metal that made it impossible to find steady footing, a lot of struggling was necessary — if she had just kept hanging out the door there for another second or so, she would have had a much better idea about the situation they were in. Because in just a few more seconds, a light did appear down there. A little light. A little light from a little blue flame even smaller than the flame on a birthday candle. It flickered to life and illuminated, faintly, the impossible jumble the car was trapped in. The little blue light fluttered and danced on the hot exhaust pipe, fed by gasoline that was dripping from the hole the fence wire had poked in the fuel tank. But she wouldn’t have seen this light for more than an instant, because she would have been blinded by the flash. There was a deafening explosion, too, but the only sound she remembered was the sickening crack her head made hitting the asphalt when the blast knocked her down.