Nina, the Bandit Queen

by Joey Slinger

  Joey Slinger

  For Peter Slinger, and Garth Graham,

  and the Relentless Spirit of Big Trout Lake

  One

  Nina Carson Dolgoy pulled at the back of her T-shirt to make sure it wasn’t stuffed into the waistband of her sweats when she came out on the porch. That’s what everybody in her family called it, even though it didn’t have a roof or anything. It was just flat concrete with holes in the corners where there once were posts that held up some kind of railing. The railings and everything had been stolen before Nina and D.S. and the girls moved in, and D.S. said it was good that they had been, because it would have been way too crowded if everybody was out there at once and the sides weren’t wide open. What had never gotten stolen were the old broken-down washer and dryer that he and Nina hauled onto it from where somebody had left them in the hall, blocking the front door. This had made it almost impossible to push the door open when Nina noticed the house was vacant and decided they might as well live there. It was getting dark when she spotted it, and she was relieved because they’d been looking for a new place ever since the men with the bulldozer and the man from the city had showed up that morning and chased them out of their old house.

  They didn’t have to break in. The door didn’t have a lock or even a knob, just those two clunky old white machines propping it closed. Later on, when D.S. would look around the porch, he’d say what a shame it was that somebody hadn’t come along and snatched the washer and dryer, because they hardly left room on the porch for anybody, but almost two years had passed since he and Nina stacked them out there, and he was beginning to think nobody was ever going to.

  The sky was getting light enough that Nina could see the outlines of the high-rise apartment towers up at The Intersection. Down here, in the part of town people called SuEz, it was still too shadowy to see much of anything. Nothing seemed to be moving anyway. Certainly not anything that might have made the weird-kind-of-music noise or the barking noise she heard. The noises hadn’t wakened Nina — the heat had. Except, when she thought about it, the heat had kept her awake all night. Except, from the way she felt, it was like she’d been awake forever and was going to stay that way. So she hauled herself out of bed and went to see what was going on. It wasn’t like she had anything better to do.

  Across the street, JannaRose was out of her house, too. She was standing between parked cars with her head to one side, listening. The noises came again, louder now. Skittery music. Then something that sounded like barking. JannaRose flipped her hands palms-up: Beats me. She tipped her head back and closed her eyes. She stood like that for so long, it was as if she’d dozed off. Then she said, “It’s gotta be —”

  Nina beat her to it. “Cops.”

  JannaRose opened one eye. “— an ice cream truck.” Not that she looked proud of her answer. What would an ice cream truck be doing out at this time of day? At this time of day on a school day?

  “Cops.”

  “What about the music?”

  Not long after they’d met, Nina’d told JannaRose her theory about cops. “If there are two ways to do something,” she’d said, “the sensible way and the completely fuckin’ stupid way, the cops will pick the one that makes you think they only take their heads out of their asses so they can blow their nose.” It turned out to be the sort of thing that both women believed.

  So Nina had an answer to the music question. “Undercover cops,” she said. “They’re using an ice cream truck to sneak up on some gangster’s house.”

  “Freeze, assholes!” JannaRose squared into a two-fisted stance, pointing her finger at Nina.

  “Mr. Freezee, assholes!” Nina said, aiming back.

  It was too hot to laugh. It was too hot to bullshit around. The women drooped. SuEz would have too except it was already drooped about as much as it was possible to droop and had been for as long as anybody could remember. It was pronounced the same as the canal in Egypt and ended up called that because it’s the southwest end of the part of the city called South Chester. South Chester takes in everything up as far as The Intersection, where the subway station is, and the high-rise apartment towers. North of that, it’s just plain Chester. Over a long period it got so everybody just called the southwest end “Southwest,” and in time this got mumbled into sounding like it was SuEz. Then it got spelled that way.

  It was regarded by the people who lived there as the worst part of town, mostly because for years it had been regarded as the worst part of town by people who didn’t live there. From a practical point of view, though, it depended on what your idea of “worst” was. The residents of SuEz often mentioned to each other how even the whores stayed out of SuEz because their customers were afraid to drive there. And how not much dope was dealt to the locals because nobody who lived in SuEz could afford even the cheapest stuff. This was the general theory anyway. Sometimes it included how the cops stayed out of it, too, and not because it was crime-free, except it sort of was, since nobody had anything worth stealing.

  On the other hand, the people who lived there were pretty insular, and while there were plenty of reasons for them being that way, it meant they really didn’t have much else to judge by.

  Tootlety-tootlety-tootlety!

  “I don’t fuckin’ believe it.” Nina sounded like she was trying not to yell.

  About five blocks up, maybe a quarter of the way to The Intersection, a truck with a flat nose crept out of a side street and onto theirs. Yellow lights flashed at the corners of the roof. Tootlety-tootlety-tootlety!

  “What’ll the cops go around disguised like next?” JannaRose never passed up an opportunity to stick it to Nina, because Nina was one of those people who could get really irritated when anybody noticed they were full of it. “The Seven Dwarfs?” This time, though, she took only the one small shot and dropped it. She could hardly believe the truck either.

  Tootlety-tootlety-tootlety! Followed by the sharp bark of amplified words still too far off to make out. But JannaRose did have to concede one thing: It sounded like cops. The way cops would sound if they sold ice cream.

  “Shit.” Nina was having a hard time trusting her eyes. Up there, when the truck pulled over to the curb, tiny figures — child-sized figures — were appearing out of houses. When it stopped in front of the little apartment buildings, the loudspeaker barked longer and clusters of the tiny figures spilled out on the walks. Grownups straggled behind them, hunched from just having crawled out of bed. But so far, everybody kept their distance. Nobody went right up to the truck. They stretched their necks almost as if they were sniffing it, not quite sure what to do.

  “That truck’s talking to those people,” JannaRose said.

  “Ice cream trucks always —”

  “No. Shut up. It’s —”

  “‘Hellllll-OH!’ they say. Then they play some tinkly —”

  “Shut up! Listen!” As the truck moved closer, the words came clearer. “It’s talking right to those kids. It knows their names.”

  Every single one of their names. All of them. It called each and every one over the loudspeaker.

  “I don’t fuckin’ believe it.”

  “It doesn’t matter if you believe it,” JannaRose said. “It’s —”

  “It’s fuckin’ insane.”

  “Alessandra,” the truck was saying, when at last they could hear it plainly. “Come and get a Glacier Gloopster.” And, “Tyree, there’s a Choc-Sicle Swirler here for you. You come right over here and see.” And, “Crydell, you love Frostie-Fudgie. We’ve got an extra special one just for you today.…

  “Lewis … a Banana Daq-a-Quack.…

  “Thomas Junior … a Killer Blizzard.…

  “Shabatha … Ronell … Kirinette … a Mr. Nice Ice
… a Slushnut Bar … an I Scream Dream.”

  Tootlety-tootlety-tootlety!

  “Katie … the Silver Shiver you’ve been wishing for …

  “Laraquinda … the Dilly Chiller you’ve been dreaming …

  “Robert James … Javier …

  “A Drool Cooler … a Purple Slurple …”

  When a name was called, the kid got pushed forward by excited little friends hoping their names would be next. But after a few seconds of embarrassment and pride that made them go all goose-pimply, being a celebrity became way more than they could bear. They ducked back into the crowd, light-headed with astonishment.

  Nina propped her hand against a car to keep from falling. Had a concrete block fallen out of the sky and landed on her head? If a concrete block fell out of the sky and landed on her head, would it feel different than this? Ice cream before breakfast! Simply thinking about it made her feel like throwing up. No it didn’t. It was thinking about it in those circumstances that did.

  “Naquacielo!” the voice barked. “Here’s a Razzle Dazzle Iceberg we worked all night making especially for you!”

  She half expected to see Naquacielo go floating up into the sky. Knots of children hovered, but still well back from the curb, like maybe they weren’t sure it wasn’t a dream and didn’t want to mess it up.

  “Is this legal?” she said.

  “Invasion of people’s privacy. There must be something like that,” JannaRose said. “My kids are going to go crazy.”

  Nina heard herself bark back at the truck. “Fuckers!”

  The truck’s own barking pulled more and more people out of bed. Heads poked from windows. The glass in the front doors of the apartment buildings had mostly been busted out, and kids ducked through where the bottom panels used to be. Racing out of houses, kids skidded to a stop like characters in cartoons, never quite going past the line where they would end up under the truck’s control, where they would have to put their money on the counter. Without looking, Nina knew that four little girls in their pyjamas had come out on her porch. Five little girls. The black one and Nina’s littlest, same size, same age — six — could be Velcroed together the way they kept their arms around each other every minute, every day. “Zanielle, you sleep any?” she called over her shoulder. Something about what was going on made her feel the need to emphasize how wide her open-armed maternity stretched. Both girls nodded without unfastening their eyes from the truck. “Fabreece, don’t you fall off that porch.”

  Fabreece was her littlest. Nina had wanted a break from names out of Camelot. Guinevere, Merlina, and Lady, short for Lady of the Lake — they were fourteen, twelve, and nine years old — had come along thirteen months apart and were supposed to stop there, but the idea of getting a vasectomy caused D.S. to faint every time it came into his mind, so he’d lied to her. And she’d believed him. Maybe all the sperm he’d pumped into her over the years had turned her brain to Cheez Whiz. So after Fabreece, she had the operation while D.S. huffed around saying he was going to go to court and sue that son-of-a-bitch doctor that did his. “You do that,” Nina had told him.

  The truck crept to a stop just shy of where she was standing. The tootlety music stopped. “I can’t get by,” the loudspeaker said. It was speaking directly to her, only it wasn’t the same voice that had been calling out the kids’ names and rhyming off the ice cream treats it had for them. That one sounded so official, it scraped the insides of Nina’s bones. This one sounded like one of the kids the ice cream was being pitched to. Through the windshield she could see the driver holding a microphone. The ice-cream selling voice must have come from a computer, one geared to something that could tell where all the kids lived and recognize them and measure their reactions.

  JannaRose said it probably involved a satellite.

  “The fuckers,” Nina said.

  The notable thing about this was, when the driver said he couldn’t get by, it hadn’t occurred to her that she was blocking the way.

  There was scrambling on the porch as D.S. came out, followed by stupefied silence as he gradually realized that his wife was in what looked like a standoff with an ice cream truck. “What’re you doing?” he yelped.

  The most notable thing of all, though, was that until D.S. started mouthing off at her, Nina wasn’t aware that she was doing anything.

  Two

  To go from being locked in a showdown with an ice cream truck to deciding to rob a bank wasn’t a straight line from A to B. It was more of a process. Some of the other things that went on between Nina and the ice cream truck that morning were also part of the process. So was the urgent need to raise money for local improvements and public works. This had to do with the swimming pool at the high school getting closed down. If she could get it reopened, it would be a good place for her daughters to burn off the aimless youthful energy that might otherwise lead them to become whores and crack addicts. This happened so often in SuEz that whenever it did, nobody was surprised. And then there was how she didn’t approve of stealing. Overcoming that obstacle was part of it, too.

  But because she didn’t know anything at all about this process, which is understandable since it was only about to get rolling, and because she definitely had no idea that she was on the brink of getting swept up in it, when D.S. Dolgoy came out on the porch and saw her eyeball-to-eyeball with the ice cream truck in the middle of the street in front of their house and said, “What’re you doing?” she didn’t find it very helpful.

  It didn’t lead her to give a little more thought to whatever it was she wasn’t aware she was doing. It didn’t throw a bucket of cold, clear reasonableness over her. It didn’t, because she knew that when he said, “What’re you doing?” it wasn’t D.S. asking a question. It was D.S. telling her, “Get the fuck off the street and stop making a fool of yourself.”

  More to the point, she also knew that by “yourself,” he meant she was making a fool of him.

  So there she was, not doing anything she was even aware of except being pissed off. And then she got told to stop doing it because it was embarrassing him. That was the thing that really pissed her off.

  Fuck you, D.S.

  She didn’t say it out loud, though, because children were present. At least he had the blond wig on the right way around. He looked ridiculous on the porch in it and her green nightie, which was a version of the disguise he’d come up with so the welfare inspectors wouldn’t figure out there was a male on the premises. He looked ridiculous in it everywhere, but not nearly as ridiculous as he looked when he got out of bed in a rush and the wig was turned around backwards. That looked idiotic, like he was peeking out through one of those Hawaiian hula dancer’s skirts. It made his daughters laugh until they peed their pants.

  One thing she did know for sure was that JannaRose was right behind her. She didn’t even have to look around. Their friendship had reached a stage where she got subconscious signals. She always knew exactly where JannaRose was and what she was doing, the same as she always knew what she was wearing, although that wasn’t difficult. A T-shirt and sweats. They used to joke about these psychic powers of Nina’s. “Okay, how many orgasms did I have last night?” JannaRose would ask. “You mean real ones?” Nina would answer. It would start them laughing until they had to hold each other up.

  “Stay right there.” Nina barely glanced around.

  “What?”

  “Don’t move.” Whether she’d done it consciously or not, JannaRose had drifted out into the middle of the street, and if she stayed right where she was, the truck was still blocked. Nina ran up the steps and yanked D.S.’s crutch out from under his arm. He didn’t particularly need it, since he was almost totally healed from the last time a customer beat him up, but he kept it around since he usually needed it several times a year. And even when he didn’t — when something happened that made him nervous, he leaned on it.

  “What?” D.S. said, stumbling around. The girls shuffled to stay out of his way, something that wasn’t all that eas
y 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.