by Joey Slinger
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 scowling. “What the fuck was that all about?”
Nina rounded on him. “You watch your language, D.S.,” she said and began herding the girls into the house with little flaps of her arms.
“Tired?” 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,” sh
e 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 there were any that people just lived in.
“You think it might be a nutrition thing?” JannaRose said. “If all we give our kids to eat is potato chips, it might not be the thing they need to grow up to be astronauts.”
Nina stared at her for a long time, but JannaRose was looking down, trying to smooth her T-shirt over her stomach, and didn’t notice. Finally, Nina gave up. “So,” she said, “it would probably be good to find something to keep her mind off it.”
JannaRose wasn’t entirely distracted, though. “Like swimming?” she said.
Nina bristled. “You don’t have to say it like that.”
“I didn’t say it like anything.” JannaRose’s voice took on a flinty edge. “I just said it.”
Nina let it drop. It wasn’t that she didn’t realize that maybe it wasn’t the ideal solution. She realized it wasn’t whenever she said it to herself. Even when she said it to herself, it sounded like she was a moron.
Ed Oataway never did understand why his family car had featured so prominently in whatever happened with JannaRose and Dipshit Dolgoy’s idiot wife at the lot where the ice cream company parked its trucks. In fact, he’d never managed to figure out anything about what went on down there, and nobody was about to tell him. It was the same with D.S. Even Nina had eventually realized that the thing she herself originally thought was the point didn’t cover everything that actually happened that night. Not when she added it all together. And to be perfectly honest, she really hadn’t expected to accomplish anything. What she’d expected was the same as she expected with everything she ever did before: not much. There hadn’t been a day in her life when it occurred to her to expect very much of anything, and nothing had come along to cause her to think otherwise. Then here, by accident, she’d driven off toward the ice cream company, and what happened turned out to be as far from not accomplishing anything as was possible. It was so different from everything else she’d ever done that it got her started examining a lot of things about her life that up till then she’d thought were basically no use at all.
What happened in the ice cream company parking lot wasn’t really very hard to describe. On the other hand, it was terrifyingly complicated.
What happened was, she created an absolute shitstorm.
Ed Oataway’s family car was complicated enough to begin with. Ed had refined his trade to where he only stole cars from people who paid to have them stolen. They did this for insurance purposes. He liked the work. There was no competition, and obviously no one was interested in calling the cops in the middle of one of his daring daylight vehicular extractions, as he called them. This meant stress was non-existent. He collected a percentage of what the individual whose car he stole paid for the job, and he held on to the car until what he referred to as the parent organization hauled it away, he figured, for the international junk trade. It was a nice little bus
iness. And it was because of the stresslessness that he’d started considering whichever of these cars happened to be waiting for trans-shipment in front of his house to be the Oataway family car. So he didn’t mind if JannaRose used it to go buy potato chips for the kids’ supper. Neither did he mind if she got Nina to drive for her, since JannaRose didn’t have a licence and got nervous driving a car with such imprecise ownership.
The one available for the assault on the ice cream company was an old brown Pontiac that was in such terrible shape, it wouldn’t even begin to turn until the steering wheel got cranked a quarter of the way around. Nina said just keeping it in a straight line was like wrestling with somebody who was having a shit fit. All the way to the ice cream factory she kept wanting to grab JannaRose by the arm and yell, “Why would anybody steal this fuckin’ thing?” What kept her from doing it was that JannaRose was already so spooked by the feeling that something awful was going to happen that it would have really upset her. When Nina considered how nervous she was herself, she didn’t want to push things any farther than she secretly planned to push them.
“What are you doing?” JannaRose’s voice sounded quavery as they passed the parking lot full of ice cream trucks for the second time.
“I told you. Looking.” Nina hauled this way and that on the steering wheel and bounced off the curb a couple of times when she finally pulled over. She got out and tried the gate. It didn’t budge. Back in the car, she glared at the fence.
“I was just thinking,” JannaRose said.
Nina glared at JannaRose.
“I was just,” JannaRose said again, “thinking that here, wherever we are, in some part of town we’ve never been before — that if something happened. And we got killed and they stole all our stuff. How will anybody know it’s our bodies?”
Nina glared at the fence.
“They sometimes use dental records, don’t they?” JannaRose said. “I saw it on television.”
That was when Nina decided that for sure it wasn’t a scouting expedition. They were going to go ahead and do it. They might never get another chance.