Nina, the Bandit Queen. Joey Slinger
his situation to counsellors, the only thing they ever suggested was confining him to an institution, but this made him even more upset because, as he explained to them every time, what had damaged his brain in the first place was confinement to an institution — the army.
In any event, when something came over Nina as powerful as a purpose that went beyond the needs of her own girls, even though it meant they would be able to go swimming without too much inconvenience, Jarmeel couldn’t avoid being affected. It didn’t matter to him if the person behind the community-wide effort was the bughouse woman Dipper was married to. It was a simple case of something fitting perfectly, and what fit was an idea he’d been kicking around for some time. As far as Jarmeel could see, there was no religion anywhere that didn’t take in a lot of money. Add to that how hard it was to imagine that he was the only person on Earth who had genuinely been kidnapped and probed by space aliens. Therefore, if enough of the others could be gathered together, they could easily become the foundation for a pretty good faith, one with the unique advantage of appealing to Catholics and Protestants and Jews. There were likely even Muslims who’d go for it. And if this new religion directed a percentage of its financial intake to a worthwhile community project, it would be perfectly all right with him even if, as he put it to D.S., “I don’t give a shit about some swimming pool one way or the other, no offence.”
In the quiet moments, when she wasn’t yelling so hard at the traffic that was making her life as the driver of a ConGlom Couriers van difficult that she came close to blacking out, Krystal Beach dreamed of getting rich quick. She liked this dream because she knew she had no other choice. She was never going to get rich slow. When it came to get-rich-quick schemes, though, every single one had a flaw. It was Step Two. Step Two always required you to pay some money to the people who were operating the scheme, sometimes a lot of money. Step Two always shattered Krystal’s dream. Any amount of money was too much. It wouldn’t have been so bad if she was on welfare. As a driver for ConGlom Couriers, she made one-third less for a fifty-five hour week than she would have made per week on welfare. That’s because she didn’t have any dependants. With dependants she could have made twice as much on welfare as she did working. She was glad she wasn’t on welfare, though. She despised welfare because it rewarded lazy fuckers and destroyed their initiative. And because they were lazy fuckers and had no initiative, she despised people on welfare. The thing she was proudest of was working for a living, because it gave her the initiative to be constantly on the lookout for a get-rich-quick scheme that would make it possible for her to quit work and spend the rest of her life sitting around doing nothing.
Despising welfare recipients made her life awkward, because the only people she knew were welfare recipients or crooks, and she had no use at all for crooks. It could be she’d have some different social contacts if she moved out of SuEz, but she’d never lived anywhere else and couldn’t imagine it. In her dream of sitting around doing nothing, she pictured it happening in what looked like SuEz, but fixed up a bit. And with more people around that she liked, although at the moment the only people she liked were welfare recipients, but then there wasn’t anybody else to choose except crooks.
True, some of these welfare recipients were different than the ones she generally despised. Even one or two of the crooks were different, such as Nina Dolgoy’s good-looking brother Frank, who was rumoured to be planning to rob a bank when he got out of jail, which he was supposed to soon. And Nina would have been crazy not to be on welfare. She had four little girls to feed and wouldn’t have been able to do it on whatever she could make working. Nina’s husband D.S. gave Krystal a pain, but he did have the saving grace of a paying job. Krystal admired him for this. As far as she was concerned, this compensated for Nina scamming the welfare department, since nobody was allowed to live with her who wasn’t a complete dependant.
She also couldn’t help but admire Nina for her generosity in allowing D.S. to keep on living with her whenever he was off work as a result of having been badly injured by an enraged customer when he was on the job. Because this happened so often — Krystal estimated he was off work five, maybe six times as much as he wasn’t — it meant that most of the time there was less money to feed Nina and the girls. She also knew how embarrassed she would be having somebody who looked like a transvestite around the house, but she knew that if the welfare inspectors ever discovered that it was actually D.S., Nina would be kicked off welfare and her girls would suffer. So every day she watched this courageous woman get along as best she could, subjected to both the scorn that goes with associating with an individual in a non-traditional gender role, and the anxiety that goes with knowing that at any instant her fraud could be discovered and the avalanche could come roaring down. If there was one thing Krystal couldn’t tolerate, it was anybody who flew in the face of established public attitudes, but nevertheless she deeply respected people who were bold enough to live their lives their own way in spite of the prejudices of narrow-minded assholes.
Add to this the community spirit that was leading Nina to try to get the school pool opened again. Put all together, Krystal’s neighbour had many of the attributes that usually allowed people who had them to look down on people who were on welfare. But she refused to. That raised Nina even higher in Krystal’s estimation, and is what inspired her to decide to raise money for the pool project as well.
Six
When it came to raising funds for Nina’s project, nobody in the whole neighbourhood was quicker off the mark than her own daughters. But first they had to deal with two major questions. Three of them did, because one of the questions was whether the fourth sister, Guinevere, should be included. The other question had to do with if it was okay to keep some of the money they collected for themselves.
“Gwinny’s, like, only interested in the bright lights,” Merlina said.
“Huh?” Lady said.
Merlina rolled her eyes. One of the totally disgusting things about her sisters was that they needed to have every word spelled out. “The towers,” she said, nodding in the direction of The Intersection. She didn’t know how you could explain anything as obvious as that without sounding stupid yourself.
Gwinny was beyond hopeless. Merly figured it would be easier to communicate with a sister made out of rock, since you might be able to get something through by banging your head against her. For as long as she could remember, Gwinny’s interest in how she looked — which Merlina calculated on a scale of one to ten at being about fifty — outweighed her interest in everything else in the world put together. She sometimes thought it wasn’t boys Gwinny cared about. It was how the boys acted when they came around — for instance, did they make her feel like some movie star? The thing was, though, because it didn’t matter who acted this way, she never noticed what kind of guys they actually were. Or maybe she didn’t care. The same as Nina.
Merly kept going on to Lady about how it was when Gwinny got her first period. Apparently it was a magical, mysterious experience that made her all goopy and mooshy about how she had been carried on her heart’s wings into a glorified state where love and romance would spring up out of the ground like flowers wherever she set her foot down.
“When I got my first period —” Merly said.
“It was a pain in the ass —” Lady said, wagging her head slightly, as if she was keeping time.
“ — it was a pain in the ass —”
“ — and that’s all it was.”
“ — and that’s all it was. What’s that you were saying?” Merly said.
“Nothing,” Lady said.
Lately Guinevere had been spending hours on the porch, looking up at the towers when the lights came on with an expression on her face that made Merly want to throw up, it was so totally fuckin’ gack. That’s what had led her to mention Gwinny and the bright lights, and try to get the other two to understand that when she said this, she meant a whole lot more than actual lights and how much they were shining.
The actual lights in the towers weren’t actually all that bright from down where the Dolgoy sisters lived in SuEz, but she wasn’t going to talk to Lady about this any more, because Lady already thought