Nina, the Bandit Queen

by Joey Slinger

  “The high school pool. What fuckin’ pool did you think?”

  “Somebody stole the water?”

  Nina tried to collect her thoughts. Stealing water made sense. As much sense as stealing anything else did. Oh, no it didn’t. Not this water. This wasn’t ordinary water. Steal ordinary water, sure. Put it in plastic bottles. Sell it to fuckin’ idiots. Make a fuckin’ fortune. Lots of people do that. She was always telling the girls, drink it out of the tap. “It’s not the same!” Get an empty plastic bottle, fill it with water out of the tap. “It’s not the same!” Who’ll know? “It’s not the same!” It’s the fuckin’ same. “It’s not the same!”

  This wasn’t the same. This was swimming pool water. Water out of the swimming pool. It was filthy. When she thought how filthy it was, it made her want to puke. It was water people had pissed in! It wasn’t even fresh filthy water. It had been there since the pool got shut down — what? Two years ago? All she could remember was how bad everybody stank when they came out of that water. She wouldn’t swim in it. She wouldn’t have let her girls swim in it.

  JannaRose tried to suggest possible natural causes. “Maybe the pool got a crack in it? Could be it leaked away. Could be there was an earthquake.”

  Nina laughed. She couldn’t believe anybody could be so dumb.

  “So what happened, then?” JannaRose asked.

  “They smashed a hole in the wall. Ran in a hose. Pumped it into a truck.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s obvious.”

  “Why is it obvious?”

  “Because they couldn’t haul it all away without a truck.”

  They started walking again, and for a long time neither of them said anything. Somehow it was a heavier kind of silence than Nina was accustomed to. She was already feeling guilty for having gone apeshit about the stolen water and implying that JannaRose wasn’t terrifically bright for not being as aware of the pool situation as she should have been. This had come right after JannaRose showed how sweet and loyal a friend she was — spending almost two days keeping Nina company while she phoned to try and get action out of the welfare department. It was to lighten this uncomfortable atmosphere that she decided to pass along a humorous sidelight to their attack on the ice cream company that only she knew about. It would make JannaRose laugh and feel better about everything. It even related to a conversation Nina had actually considered having with JannaRose on their way to the ice cream factory, a conversation about Tampax and the possibility of using some to blow up one of the trucks. But what with one thing and another —

  “Tampax?” JannaRose looked stunned, although nowhere near as stunned as she would be when she thought about the significance of what Nina was saying in terms of their unspoken pact that they told each other everything the minute it crossed their minds.

  “Wouldn’t it have been something?” Nina said.

  “The fuck do you mean Tampax?”

  “Strung together,” Nina said. “I could’ve slid them down into the gas tank of an ice cream truck. Once they got soaked with gas, I’d light the end. Boom! I had a bunch of them already tied together in my pocket.”

  “You told me you didn’t even plan the thing with Ed’s car. That it came to you out of nowhere. That we were just on a scouting expedition.”

  “Yeah. This was just in case.”

  “Just in case?”

  What did this all mean? Could it be that from the start, from when they pulled away from JannaRose’s house, Nina had known that if she couldn’t get the gate unlocked, she’d bust it down with the Pontiac, pull out her Tampax string, and blow up an ice cream truck? Read between the lines and could it be you’d see how she had it all worked out? Read between the lines and could it be you’d see that Nina didn’t count on JannaRose in every situation? Maybe it would be a good idea if she was a little more careful about Nina in certain circumstances. “Maybe” — she grabbed Nina’s sleeve — “maybe it’d be a lot safer for everybody if we just wrote a letter to the mayor or somebody.”

  Nina blinked a very slow blink. “A letter?”

  “About the ice cream company. About getting them to stop calling out the kids’ names and putting pressure on everybody.”

  “You ever write a letter?”

  JannaRose didn’t say anything.

  “To anybody?”

  JannaRose looked so close to sinking right into the ground that Nina stopped herself from saying, “So who the fuck are you to talk about writing some kind of fuckin’ letter?” Finally she just said, “I’ve got a feeling it would be a waste of time.” And again she stopped walking. Only this time, she stood completely still, not moving a muscle. An idea as hot as a welding rod had nailed her square in the forehead. “Because,” she said slowly, “because nobody,” she said, “listens to people like us.”

  Nina closed her eyes, trying to get the idea cooled down and settled in one place. “So why bother trying to get somebody else to listen?” She grabbed JannaRose by the shoulders. “So why bother with anybody else at all?”

  She started hopping up and down. “Who needs them?” she shouted. “Who needs them?”

  Whatever was happening in her brain was making her realize something so totally contrary to anything that had ever occurred to her before that she had to struggle to keep from falling over backwards.

  “What’s the matter?” JannaRose had never seen anybody who looked so much like they’d just stuck themselves into a light socket and turned on the switch.

  “I’m — I’m — I — it — it just came to me.”

  “What, for Christ’s sakes?”

  Nina drew herself up as much as she could. She looked into her friend’s eyes. She looked so deeply, it was as if she was staring right through her head and out the back. She spoke slowly, and very clearly.

  “That being a welfare queen —”

  JannaRose nodded. Waiting for it. Ready. “Yes?”

  “That being a welfare queen doesn’t have to be a dead end,” Nina said.

  Five

  Maybe you had to be a welfare queen to get the full impact.

  D.S. was the only person Nina knew of on their street, except for Krystal Beach who drove a courier service van, with an actual paying job. Krystal, unfortunately, had gone kind of crazy as a result of the emotional setbacks she kept suffering as a result of being stalked by both her ex-husbands. And D.S. hadn’t been paid when he was off work as a result of injury. Total, the world’s biggest discount store, where he worked as a greeter, said that if he wanted financial assistance for being disabled, he should sue the customers that kicked his head in.

  Nina could never shake her suspicion that JannaRose and Ed Oataway were in something like a loving relationship. On the other hand, it did have a financial upside. They got a welfare combo — Ed qualified because he wasn’t suitable employment material. Nobody would hire him because the half a dozen times he’d been in jail for car theft had given employers the idea that he was some kind of habitual criminal. When Nina got her innards twisted because of something or other Ed Oataway did, she’d remind D.S. that Ed’s criminal record was entirely due to him being lousy at stealing cars unless the owners paid him to do it. But the plain fact was that JannaRose and Ed appeared to have feelings that she couldn’t detect in any other relationships she knew of offhand.

  She and D.S. certainly weren’t like that and never had been. Not after the first couple of weeks anyway, when Nina stopped believing any of the lies she’d been telling herself. As far as she could figure, they’d only gotten together because everybody they knew was sleeping with somebody except them. And it wasn’t as if either of them had ever been regarded with much interest by anybody else. So they drifted toward each other. There was no denying that even then he almost always had some kind of a paying job, even if none of them ever paid enough for him to move out of his mother’s apartment. With Nina’s welfare cheque, he could afford to live with her in her mother’s apartment.

  Nina always
said she would rather have been able to find a job, because there wasn’t a job she knew of that was harder work than being on welfare. She said that even if the job was full-time, it wouldn’t have taken as much of her time as being on welfare did. Just keeping yourself on it took every bit of your attention. And if you weren’t on top of it every minute, you were liable to find yourself kicked off. Even if you did manage to stay right on top of it, you were still liable to find yourself kicked off. She said being a welfare queen called for total commitment.

  Jarmeel Tolbert, whose little girl was such good friends with Fabreece, worked what Nina considered to be full-time, except the work consisted of trying to get a pension for the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder he came down with in the army. His failure to obtain a pension after having his nerves crippled in the wartime service of his nation was enough to leave him as disabled emotionally as D.S. was physically, and should by rights have entitled him to the disability payments D.S. couldn’t get every time his head got kicked in. D.S. said the difference was that what happened to him at Total was in the private sector, but this never seemed to comfort Jarmeel. Neither did the welfare cheques, which was all he got. He got those for being a single parent who was raising three children he’d had by three different women who all packed up and moved out, abandoning him with the babies shortly after each one was born. Either one of these on its own — that he kept on getting married again, or that he kept on getting abandoned again — was all the evidence Nina and JannaRose needed that he should qualify for far more than the standard disability, even though the diagnosis of crazy fucker wasn’t listed on any of the forms.

  When he mentioned 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 som
ething 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 Merly had a head full of mouse turds.