Nina, the Bandit Queen. Joey Slinger
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.
Vaguely … when she floated up into consciousness, she could vaguely make out a voice going “Yiiiiii-i-i-i!” Oh Jesus, JannaRose was hurt! Wait. It wasn’t JannaRose’s voice. It was hers. She stopped shrieking. It wasn’t easy, but she forced herself. Only she could still hear it! “Yiiiiii-i-i-i!” Now that was JannaRose. And now she could see her. She didn’t look hurt, though. She looked hysterical. She was pressed up against one of the ice cream trucks, screaming at the flames like a crazy person.
The flames!
The whole world was in flames!
No. That was wrong. The whole world wasn’t. It just looked like that at first. The only thing in flames was Ed Oataway’s stupid, stolen old brown Pontiac.
It was a long walk, but Ed Oataway didn’t care that it was almost two in the morning when they got back. He came out and stood in the middle of the street yelling how come his car had exploded, and what were they doing with it way over there anyway.
“Can I help it if he’s missing the point?” Nina said to D.S. That wasn’t what worried her, though. What worried her was that he might smack JannaRose around. But all he did was yell at Nina about how if she had any guts she’d step out there and he’d pound her head in. That was why she told D.S. not to bother going out and making him shut up, since what Ed was doing didn’t matter even slightly. D.S. explained that he had no intention of making Ed Oataway shut up, because there were times when a man had to blow off whatever was putting too much pressure on his mind. What he wanted to do was advise him as a friend that he better not tempt Nina to step out there, because if she did she would break him in two. D.S. said that was why Ed wasn’t about to smack JannaRose around and why he never had: she outweighed him about three to one and was half again as tall, and if he tried anything she would break him in two even quicker than Nina could.
Nina rocked her head back and forth like something had come loose inside and told D.S. that he was missing the point, too. But D.S. didn’t listen, and Ed whanged him in the face so hard with one of the hubcaps that was always lying beside the curb that it knocked his wig flying. When the welfare inspector hammered on her door, Ed had gone back to yelling about what he’d do if she would only step out there, and D.S. was lying on the road moaning.
“Hey, lady,” the welfare inspector hollered when nobody answered the door, “there’s something about that dyke you’re having an affair with that you might not know.” With him and Ed both shouting, he failed to hear D.S. come up the steps behind him. Getting whanged in the face with the hubcap had started D.S.’s nose bleeding, and blood was dripping down his nightie from between his fingers. His unexpected arrival startled the welfare inspector so much he nearly jumped off the porch, but once he calmed down he spoke accusingly. “I’m making note of this incident,” he informed D.S., “which has led me to observe that you are not a dyke, as I had originally thought. That buzzcut,” he said, “that you have been hiding under your wig, plus taking into account your unshaven legs and propensity to engage in acts of physical violence with your neighbour, makes it clear that what you actually are is a bull dyke. And I wish to assure you,” he said, “that the welfare department will not tolerate this, especially considering that children are —”
“Excuse me,” D.S. blurbled through a handful of blood. Stepping around the inspector, he opened the door, went inside, and shut it again. After awhile the inspector went away, leaving only Ed Oataway making a fuss. And he was gone when JannaRose looked out in the morning.
JannaRose told Nina that because he was required to pay the parent company a premium for having lost the car he’d stolen, he’d driven up to visit Nina’s brother Frank in the penitentiary. He hoped that Frank might have some kind of an idea that would help him out of the jam Nina had gotten him into. JannaRose was especially careful not to put it the way Ed had when he announced where he was going, which was, “to see that fuckin’ lunatic woman’s asshole brother.”
Nina could hardly believe it anyway. From one extreme — really stupid — where JannaRose’s personal safety could have been endangered because he might possibly have let his violent instincts take control of his actions, Ed Oataway had swung to the other extreme — really, really stupid. When she came right out and asked, “Does he honestly think my asshole brother might know anything about anything?” JannaRose pretended not to hear the question.
But thanks to Ed going to see him, she found out that her brother had a bank robbery lined up for when he got released, which he expected to be soon, having completed three of the eleven years he’d been doing for fraud. For awhile after that, nobody talked about anything else.
Four
The failure of her next welfare cheque to show up should not be understated as a factor in Nina’s decision to raise charitable funds by alternative means. This made it six months in a row that she hadn’t been able to cash one. “It’s tough enough being a welfare queen even when the money is rolling in,” she said.
She called about it, not expecting to reach anybody at the welfare department, but due to some freak circumstance, somebody answered the phone on the second day. She’d spent all the day before waiting because a machine kept telling her that her call was important to them, but the next day’s breakthrough occurred when she’d only been on hold for five hours.
There was a welfare office in the underground mall at the high-rise towers, and she wasn’t at all afraid of being around The Intersection in the daytime, so she could have gone in person. But every time she did, the line of people waiting trailed out the door, past the empty windows of the shops that had gone out of business, and up the stairs and out on to the street. It seemed to her that there was something pointless about getting in that line, since it was always exactly the same. It never moved. It was always the same people in the same places. Once people started waiting in that line, they never quit. She said this was because standing in it had given their lives some positive direction, maybe even a purpose. As long as they did it, they had an identity that wasn’t limited to being poor and getting screwed by the welfare department. They had become the kind of people who did something about what was happening to them — who actively did something. They were seekers of justice, correctors of errors, unwilling to be victimized more than they already had been, believers in the rights of individuals, and bound and determined to get theirs. They would resent anybody who suggested they were wasting their time, resent it so much they would become a howling bloody-eyed mob that dragged whoever questioned them into the line — because the last thing they were ever going to do was leave it and lose their places — and tore them limb from limb. So no matter how careful Nina was about putting her observation into words, it would still amount to her calling them a bunch of dumb fucks, and who likes that?
The person who answered the phone put Nina through to the wrong extension which, by coincidence, turned out to be the chief welfare inspector’s office, so she figured she might as well take advantage of the opportunity and complain about the welfare inspector who was spying through her bedroom