Nina, the Bandit Queen. Joey Slinger
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?”
Three
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