Nina, the Bandit Queen. Joey Slinger
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