Nina, the Bandit Queen. Joey Slinger
stupidest people in the world happened to be the oldest and the youngest children in her family, and later on wondered if there was a scientific reason for it that had to do with statistics, or was it always like this? If it was, she told Lady, it really didn’t seem worth making all that big a fuss if either of them disappeared.
Before Nina came screaming out the door, Ed Oataway had already seen the man putting Fabreece into a car and yelled at him. As the man got in the car and started it up, Ed jumped in whatever family car it was that he happened to have on hand that day and rammed into the front of the other one, and that was the end of that.
“It’s getting so hardly a day goes by that I don’t sacrifice one of my vehicles for somebody or other in that fuckin’ idiot family,” he said when JannaRose ran up to ask what the hell he was doing this time.
Seven
What came out of all the visionary stuff whirling around in Nina’s head was her theory that if they collected a huge enough amount of money and donated it to rebuilding the school pool, other people might feel the urge to donate some of their own. There is an official, financial term for what she imagined would kick-start this outpouring of generosity — it’s called seed money — but she had never heard of such a thing and neither had anybody else she talked to about it. Some people went so far as to scoff.
“You’re nuts,” JannaRose said.
On top of that, if they could somehow collect enough money to get the pool going again, wouldn’t people naturally start paying attention to them? Enough attention that maybe they could get somebody to talk to the ice cream company? Somebody like the mayor?
“Really fuckin’ nuts.”
If Nina had never heard of seed money, she never thought of the money they’d need to get the project rolling as bank robbery money, either. Anybody could raise money any way that suited them. It just happened that this was the only one that fit her skill set. But it wasn’t until JannaRose started hinting that it would be nice if Nina’s brother’s plan for when he got out of jail included a position that Ed Oataway might fill that the idea of acquiring the necessary money by robbing a bank began jumping up and down in the back of her mind, demanding attention. Filling such a position would get Ed out of hock with the parent company for the Pontiac a whole lot faster than the only other obvious way, which was stealing a bunch of cars from people who didn’t want them stolen. Suspecting where that would lead and not wishing to see her family broken apart caused JannaRose to slam things so hard that Nina could hear it across the street. Nina figured that was probably why JannaRose was doing it, but she also couldn’t help but think that behaving like that would be out of character for JannaRose unless things looked quite a bit worse than usual.
As far as Nina could see, the idea of Frank robbing anything was idiotic. It wasn’t necessarily that he was too dumb — he was smarter than Ed Oataway. Even she had to admit that much. But robbery wasn’t his style. Nina always believed that people gravitated to whatever they were intended to do the way quarters and dimes and so on gravitated through the right holes in those machines that sort coins at the supermarket. It was why Frank leaned toward selling driveway resurfacing to old people and then disappearing with their downpayments. If he’d wanted to squeeze out of them the rest of the money they’d agreed to pay, he’d have had to come back with a barrel of used crankcase oil to brush on the driveway so it looked decent until it dried, by which time he’d have vanished with all their money.
But for this he’d have needed a truck, and if there was one thing that ranked up there with the Law of Gravity in SuEz, it was the situation when it came to trucks. The situation was that anybody in SuEz who had a truck had stolen it in the last hour or so, and the only thing they’d be interested in was selling it — not using it to do something else. A truck was a short-term proposition. Besides that, there would have been the hard work required to brush the fake stuff on some old fart’s driveway, and Frank could live without hard work every bit as well as he could live happily with just their downpayments. Sometimes he’d branch out into landscaping — design and construction. The deal there was the same as driveway resurfacing, especially the part where he told them how it would increase the value of their property. This particularly appealed to people who were going to have to sell soon and move into an old folks’ home. The same business fundamentals were involved: extremely low overhead and a minimum of labour and physical risk.
Frank never cared any more for risk that Ed Oataway did. D.S. used to say that was why Frank never would have made it in legitimate business, where some customer would beat the shit out of you without any warning and you’d be sent home with no compensation, until you were healthy enough to go back to work. According to D.S., if the economy had as many downturns as he did personally, people would still be getting their groceries by sneaking up behind them and hitting them with a rock. When he first said that, Nina was on the verge of remarking, “Would you run that by me again?” but by then she’d been around D.S. long enough to realize life was too short.
It was Frank’s negative attitude toward risk that made Nina think bank robbery was an extremely strange venture for him to undertake. But anybody who thought her opinion on this would have any effect on Frank’s plans, or Ed’s for that matter, was entirely out of touch. Frank had never been even slightly interested in his sister’s opinion about anything, or anybody else’s that she could think of. And Ed had by now definitely decided that Nina couldn’t be a bigger pain in the ass if she was triplets, and the only thing he was interested in hearing from her ever again was maybe a cry for help when a great big hole opened up in the ground and swallowed her and she disappeared forever. “I wouldn’t lift a fuckin’ finger,” he told D.S.
D.S. said that was entirely up to Ed. After getting a face-full of hubcap that night, he’d decided that whatever was going on between Ed and Nina was their business and he was better off staying out of it.
Then again, Frank had been locked up for three years, and who could say? Something could have happened to him the way it apparently sometimes did in jail. Nina didn’t know many people other than Ed and Frank who had ever done time. They weren’t all over the place in SuEz the way they were in the towers, where D.S. used to say there were three kinds of folks: the ones who just got out of jail; the ones who were in jail at the moment — probably this was the reason so many of the apartments were unoccupied; and finally the ones who were trying to think of something they could do that would get them sent to jail. Down where he and Nina and the girls lived, everybody was generally too busy doing whatever it took to get through the day to spend the time necessary to put together the sort of deal that would get the police tactical squad introducing itself by asking them to lean their hands against the wall and spread their legs. The chances of that weren’t quite as long as any of them entering their yacht in the next America’s Cup, but pretty close. Criminal-type things did occur, of course, but they were almost always unpremeditated.
Nina said in those cases jail amounted to a big time out. Everybody got a chance to cool off, on top of which a convict could treat the time behind bars as a developmental experience, during which they could catch up on the movies they’d missed since the TV got stolen from their house. And there were some people who just plain benefited from the routine that went with being locked away. She looked straight at Merlina when she said this, although Merly believed it was because she was the only other person in the family who realized that her sisters didn’t know the meaning of responsibility.
Frank was as good-looking as the guys in those Bud Light commercials. What he wasn’t, however, was anywhere near as ambitious as even the Bud Light guys. This was another thing that made his plan to hold up a bank sort of curious, because from the way Ed talked, it sounded as if there was more to it than simply getting out of jail and sticking up some branch in a plaza the way a person might if they happened to be walking by one and it occurred to them that since they were broke, they might as well whip in and rob it.
The only time he ever had anything like ambition, it had led directly to winning what D.S. called a full scholarship to Hard-Time U. He wouldn’t have landed in jail if he hadn’t gotten involved with a woman who was remarkable for a number of reasons that would also include, when he got out, being the registered owner of a five-hundred-thousand