Nina, the Bandit Queen

by Joey Slinger

  “But,” JannaRose said, “if you haven’t been to the dentist in — I don’t know. I went once when I was little. One came to the school and looked at our teeth. She was a lady dentist. But,” she said, “what good will that do? I bet she didn’t even keep records.”

  Nina decided something else, too. If they were going to do it, they better do it quick. JannaRose was getting freaky. Any minute she was going to start babbling about never seeing her kids again. About how she hadn’t kissed them goodbye.

  “When was the last time you did?” JannaRose said.

  “What?”

  “Went to a dentist.”

  “I don’t know, goddamn it!”

  But she didn’t say it. Not like that. JannaRose would have blown to pieces right on the spot.

  “I don’t know,” she whispered. She had to. It was the only way she could keep her voice under control.

  For awhile they sat in silence. JannaRose thought they were both thinking about teeth, so it shocked her when Nina hammered her fist on the steering wheel and put the shift in drive.

  “Now what’re you doing?”

  Getting into that parking lot. She almost felt as if she had nothing to do with whatever was going to happen from here on. There wasn’t any actual plan. No Step One leading to Step Two leading to … Kaboom! Once again, some power way down inside her, so deep she’d only just discovered it, was in control. A force more potent than anything she’d ever known. She was perfectly capable of making herself stop breathing, except as soon as she stopped thinking about not breathing, she started breathing again. But she was doing this without thinking even slightly. Like she was just part of what was happening. If she didn’t do it, it would be as if she held her breath for so long that she died. And that was impossible.

  “Why are you crashing into the gate?”

  She wasn’t crashing into it. She was pushing it open.

  The gate was built to swing open like a door, but the padlock refused to give. “Holy shit!” JannaRose watched the nose of the car press against the chain link. She watched the chain link stretch the way a balloon does when you press your finger into it. The frame of the gate started bending. “Holy shit!”

  JannaRose’s voice sounded like it was a long way away. Nina dropped the shift into low and stomped on the gas.

  The chain link just kept on bulging. Then the balloon burst. “Holy shit!” The car jumped forward. Metal fenceposts ripped out of the ground. The gate slumped flat under the Pontiac. Long sections of fence came down on either side, and the car screeched. Bucked. Jerked to a stop. Nina floored it. It wouldn’t back up, either. She tried rocking it, forward, back. The engine roared, metal squealed, otherwise nothing. It wasn’t going to move.

  “Aw, for fuck’s sakes,” she said.

  “Holy shit!” JannaRose kept saying it, over and over.

  Nina opened the door and leaned way out, trying to see underneath. It was hard to do. Broken strands of chain link fencing grabbed at her hair, scratched her face. It was this wire, combined with jackknifed pieces of the fence’s frame, that had grabbed the bottom of 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 window and confronting her on the street with vague threats and anti-gay slurs. She punched in her welfare ID number as instructed, and a computerized voice informed her that the registered client — “Nina. Carson. Dolgoy” — had been the victim of identity theft. It informed her that her last cheque had been diverted and/or intercepted and cashed by a person representing himself/herself as the previously named “Nina. Carson. Dolgoy.” Since the caller was evidently in possession of the Nina. Carson. Dolgoy welfare ID number, the caller was evidently the identity thief, or the recipient of materials acquired by identity theft, and must immediately turn himself/herself in at the nearest police station.

  Nina dropped the phone. Leaning her head against the tamper-proof coinbox, she watched it swing back and forth and the end of its vandal-proof cord.

  Of all the things that had been going on lately, it was hard for JannaRose to say which surprised her most, but finding this working payphone was right up there. So was finding it in the basement mall at the towers, considering that even the toilets had been smashed in the public washrooms down there, although it hadn’t stopped people from using them. And finding the same telephone the next morning, still working, was something she never would have predicted. But Nina said it made sense if anybody bothered to think about it. The gangsters would want at least one guaranteed way of communicating in case their mobile phones went dead, and there was nobody handy to steal one from. On the other hand, Nina had to agree that once she got through to whatever it was she got through to, although all she got do was punch in some numbers, the transaction went on a lot longer than any she’d ever heard of before. If things kept going like that, the next thing she knew, the welfare department would be coming around to where she lived, bringing her a nice lunch, and doing her wash.

  “Identity theft?” JannaRose said.

  “Somebody stole my identity and cashed my last cheque.”

  “But they didn’t send out your last cheque because your name was spelled wrong —”

  “That’s right.”

  “— and if you signed it, it would’ve amounted to forgery, and that would be a crime, and the welfare department —”

  “Yes.”

  “— didn’t want to be a party to a crime. But somebody cashed it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Unless,” JannaRose said, “they sent out another cheque with your name spelled right and you cashed it. But,” she said, “you have no memory of it because you immediately lost the money, which caused you to have a stroke. Or,” she said, “you had a stroke and can’t remember getting the money.”

  “Don’t stop now, sweetie pie,” Nina said.

  “But wouldn’t that mean you must have stolen —”

  “Yes?”

  “— your own identity?”

  “Yes!” Nina pumped her fist.

  JannaRose spread her fingers over her mouth. “That’s awful. How can you prove you’re the you the possible replacement cheque was issued to, and not —”

  Nina sighed.

  “— the you that stole your own identity and used it to cash the cheque? If it was two people, you and an identity thief, then it would be your word against theirs. But,” JannaRose said, “if there’s just one of you, and you stole you own identity, then it’s your word against yourself. And who’s going to believe you?”

  As screwups went, the only thing this one had going for it was that it was one Nina had never heard of before. It wasn’t like she and D.S. and the girls would get evicted for not paying the rent if the cheques didn’t start coming soon. They already didn’t pay rent. And nobody was going to bother evicting them, since the bulldozer was about to knock the house down to make way for apartment buildings. For all she knew, it had happened while she was away phoning the welfare department.

  The last time she got an actual cheque and had turned it into actual cash, she’d taken snippets of the money and hidden them around the house to keep D.S. from finding it in one lump sum and spending it on god knows what. Last night she’d been up till all hours looking for some of those hiding places, figuring maybe she hadn’t found them all, since she was sure she’d hidden more money than she’d been able to track down so far, which was none. Not being able to find even fifty cents made her start to panic — her chest got tight, her ears filled with a buzzy, tingling sound. She searched the whole house twice more before giving up. If she hadn’t given up, she was going to start ripping out the baseboards. That would have been poke-your-own-eyes-out insanity, because she knew she hadn’t done anything like rip the baseboards off to hide it in the first place. Still, the feeling w
eighed on her that when she got home, she was going to turn the place inside out again.

  Walking home from the towers, she squinted at their rooflines. She couldn’t hear any bees, although maybe it was impossible right down there. It could be they had to travel a ways before they started making the noise that sounded like a sheet being torn in half. Or it could be there weren’t any at the moment. Neither she nor JannaRose bought for one minute the idea some people had that there weren’t any at all, that they were one of those urban myths. She and JannaRose mostly heard them when they lay in bed at night, unable to sleep. D.S. used to say he didn’t believe they existed, because why would anybody fire high-powered rounds over SuEz and not aim them anywhere else in the city? If bullets were flying over the rest of town, there would be big complaints. Nobody else would stand for it. The police would be all over the place. Although most of the people in Nina’s house said afterwards that they didn’t remember, she knew full well a lot of them heard them when Frank showed up the night after he got out of jail. That’s why they’d all gone outside and stared into the black sky: those ripping noises. More bees at one time than she’d ever heard. Maybe it had gotten blotted out of their memories by the shock of realizing it was the last time any of them ever laid eyes on her brother.

  She slumped along, wondering if, even though you couldn’t hear bee noises this close to the towers, you wouldn’t at least hear some other noises associated with them that maybe didn’t carry as far as her house. Then she turned around so suddenly that JannaRose almost crashed head-on into her.

  “Why would anybody steal the water?” The question came right out of the blue and wiped out everything else she’d been thinking.

  “What water?” JannaRose said.

  “The pool water.”

  “What pool?”