Nina, the Bandit Queen

by Joey Slinger

  “At least in her case there are boys,” Lady said, giving Merly a look.

  “At least I’m not a prick,” Merly said.

  Lately Merly had started calling Lady a prick when she got mad at her. Partly this was because she always kind of had the feeling that Lady should be her brother. It wasn’t that she necessarily went around acting like a boy, but there was definitely something about her — for instance, the times when Merlina was interested in having an argument and Lady was only interested in punching her. Sometimes Lady would even punch her for no reason. Another good example was the ice cream truck. When it came by and called out their names and told them they couldn’t have any of the wonderful things it had for them because their mother was a mean, ugly bitch who wanted to make their lives shitty, Lady didn’t seem to care about the ice cream or why she couldn’t have any. What interested her was the truck: how it was specially built to carry ice cream and keep it from melting. The way Lady looked at it, that was awesome.

  The question of keeping some of the money they raised for themselves came up because Merlina imagined they might be able to wait around the corner, out of sight of Nina, and when the truck came by it wouldn’t know they were her daughters. They would probably have to use fake names.

  Gwinny wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with the scheme, because she had her own ideas about her life and where it was heading and how she would get there, and she didn’t want Merly prying into her fuckin’ business about anything, any time. Lady went along with Merly, but Merly knew that if anything got too weird she would make a big fuss and cause trouble. Maybe even bloodshed. Sometimes when she wasn’t interested in punching Merly, she bit her.

  “How much do you think they’d give us?” Lady said, after Merly outlined her idea.

  “Hundreds,” Merly said. She had no idea, but considering how Lady’s mind worked, it made sense to sound like they’d be getting big money. Lady liked things when she knew how they would come out exactly. That was why she spent so long reading the instructions that came with stuff. Most people who bought things paid no attention to the manuals, but Lady would memorize them. In fact, because nothing new ever came into their house, no manuals did either, so she would memorize other peoples’, or even manuals that she found in the trash. Going over how things worked could keep her occupied for hours.

  She thought about the hundreds Merlina had mentioned. Then she wrote the number five on the concrete step as if her finger was a piece of chalk. “Five hundreds?” she asked.

  “Probably.”

  “Five hundreds would make Mom really happy.”

  “But if we wanted to, we could just give her four.”

  Lady stiffened. She stared at the invisible number she’d written on the step. Merlina had hoped she could kind of sneak that part of the idea in. “Four hundred and fifty?” Merlina said.

  “Why not all five?”

  “In case we wanted to keep some for ourselves.” Lady snapped her head around and looked at her sister, and Merlina knew she was going to have to work hard to sell this angle.

  “To buy ice cream with?” Merly suggested.

  “That’s stealing.”

  “It is so not stealing! It’s just a little bit extra for us. For the work we’ve done to raise it.”

  “Why don’t we just steal some money and buy ice cream with that?” Lady said. Not only was ice cream not at the top of Lady’s priority list, there was no logic behind her thinking.

  “Okay, okay, okay.” The important thing was agreeing on the main goal.

  “You’re always like that, Merly,” Lady said. “You’re always thinking about what you can get out of something. That’s all you care about.” She stamped up the steps and into the house.

  This didn’t especially bother Merly. As long as Lady was busy being upset about the ice cream part of the plan, she wouldn’t pay close attention to the other parts, which started happening more quickly than Merly was completely prepared for.

  It was because Lady heard her sister talking to a stranger that she came back out on the porch. And when Merlina whizzed past holding a bunch of money, she tore into the house after her.

  “Mom! Mom!” Merly hollered. “Look! For your pool!”

  Nina was sitting at the kitchen table looking quite confused, as if she didn’t know what to do about the hole where the back door used to be. With the door gone, the kitchen felt a whole lot bigger and a lot emptier. When Merlina pushed the money into her hands, it took a considerable effort to change from thinking about the missing door. “What’s —”

  “How much is it, Mom,” Lady yelled. “How much did she give you?”

  “What’s this?” Nina looked at the money as if it was a snake that was about to sink its fangs into her chin.

  “How much is it?” Lady wanted the exact details, and wanted them right then.

  Nina spread the bills and held them up, all four of them. “What’s going on?”

  “You liar! Liar!” Lady balled her fists. Her yelling got even louder. “You lying fuckin’ liar!”

  There was no way Merly was going to let her get away with calling her that. She had worked out the plan, she’d gotten the payoff. “It’s all —”

  But there was no stopping Lady. “She’s like, ‘We’ll get five hundred!’ Five hundred, Mom! The lying cunt-face!”

  Five hundred is actually what Merlina asked for. She was sitting on the steps going over the details when a man walked by and said, “If you go for drive with me, I’ll give you something nice.” Men did this now and then. Merly and Lady called them “kidnappers” and warned each other to be careful of them. But even though one coming by was essential this time, it was unbelievable. It had hardly been a minute since she’d discussed the plan with Lady, and here it was happening. “Hold on,” she told him, nodding as hard as she could. “Don’t go away.” She ran into the house.

  And when the time came to talk money, five hundred is what she told him. Cash in advance.

  “Except this is all … it’s all he had.” She said this to Lady very carefully, because it was important that she understand, having been in on the idea from the beginning.

  “Why didn’t you just tell him no?” Now, though, Lady was screaming. Bits of spit were coming out of her mouth.

  “All he had for what?” Nina said. She let the four five dollar bills fall on the floor. Her face had gone white. She held Lady by the shoulder, but she looked right at Merly.

  “Tell him no?” Merly said. “Mom needs money, and this is at least something.”

  “Fabreece?” Nina said. Instinct told her it had to do with Fabreece.

  “It was all he had!” Merlina screamed. “I’m telling you!”

  “Where is Fabreece?” Nina screamed.

  “Up the street!” Lady screamed, giving her sister a look that made Merlina feel like she was some kind of a shit. “Getting put in a man’s car!”

  When everything cooled down and she got a chance to go over it all, Merlina had to agree that twenty dollars wasn’t very much help when it came to fixing the pool. She’d only accepted it because she was a person who just naturally got enthusiastic about things. For a minute there, she was so excited about making a deal that she kind of lost sight of the actual amount the man was offering.

  Later on she did ask Lady if she personally would pay twenty dollars if, for example, Fabreece got kidnapped on her own, without any of her sisters’ assistance, and that was how much the kidnappers wanted for ransom. Lady said she’d never had twenty dollars, so she wouldn’t be in a position to do it. If the kidnappers knew anything about their family and all they asked for was five dollars, they’d be lucky to get that.

  Merly told her she’d be happy to pay them five dollars if she could come up with it, but that was the limit.

  She never could get over how the stupidest people in the world happened to be the oldest and the youngest children in her family, and later on wondered if there was a scientific reason for it that had to do
with statistics, or was it always like this? If it was, she told Lady, it really didn’t seem worth making all that big a fuss if either of them disappeared.

  Before Nina came screaming out the door, Ed Oataway had already seen the man putting Fabreece into a car and yelled at him. As the man got in the car and started it up, Ed jumped in whatever family car it was that he happened to have on hand that day and rammed into the front of the other one, and that was the end of that.

  “It’s getting so hardly a day goes by that I don’t sacrifice one of my vehicles for somebody or other in that fuckin’ idiot family,” he said when JannaRose ran up to ask what the hell he was doing this time.

  Seven

  What came out of all the visionary stuff whirling around in Nina’s head was her theory that if they collected a huge enough amount of money and donated it to rebuilding the school pool, other people might feel the urge to donate some of their own. There is an official, financial term for what she imagined would kick-start this outpouring of generosity — it’s called seed money — but she had never heard of such a thing and neither had anybody else she talked to about it. Some people went so far as to scoff.

  “You’re nuts,” JannaRose said.

  On top of that, if they could somehow collect enough money to get the pool going again, wouldn’t people naturally start paying attention to them? Enough attention that maybe they could get somebody to talk to the ice cream company? Somebody like the mayor?

  “Really fuckin’ nuts.”

  If Nina had never heard of seed money, she never thought of the money they’d need to get the project rolling as bank robbery money, either. Anybody could raise money any way that suited them. It just happened that this was the only one that fit her skill set. But it wasn’t until JannaRose started hinting that it would be nice if Nina’s brother’s plan for when he got out of jail included a position that Ed Oataway might fill that the idea of acquiring the necessary money by robbing a bank began jumping up and down in the back of her mind, demanding attention. Filling such a position would get Ed out of hock with the parent company for the Pontiac a whole lot faster than the only other obvious way, which was stealing a bunch of cars from people who didn’t want them stolen. Suspecting where that would lead and not wishing to see her family broken apart caused JannaRose to slam things so hard that Nina could hear it across the street. Nina figured that was probably why JannaRose was doing it, but she also couldn’t help but think that behaving like that would be out of character for JannaRose unless things looked quite a bit worse than usual.

  As far as Nina could see, the idea of Frank robbing anything was idiotic. It wasn’t necessarily that he was too dumb — he was smarter than Ed Oataway. Even she had to admit that much. But robbery wasn’t his style. Nina always believed that people gravitated to whatever they were intended to do the way quarters and dimes and so on gravitated through the right holes in those machines that sort coins at the supermarket. It was why Frank leaned toward selling driveway resurfacing to old people and then disappearing with their downpayments. If he’d wanted to squeeze out of them the rest of the money they’d agreed to pay, he’d have had to come back with a barrel of used crankcase oil to brush on the driveway so it looked decent until it dried, by which time he’d have vanished with all their money.

  But for this he’d have needed a truck, and if there was one thing that ranked up there with the Law of Gravity in SuEz, it was the situation when it came to trucks. The situation was that anybody in SuEz who had a truck had stolen it in the last hour or so, and the only thing they’d be interested in was selling it — not using it to do something else. A truck was a short-term proposition. Besides that, there would have been the hard work required to brush the fake stuff on some old fart’s driveway, and Frank could live without hard work every bit as well as he could live happily with just their downpayments. Sometimes he’d branch out into landscaping — design and construction. The deal there was the same as driveway resurfacing, especially the part where he told them how it would increase the value of their property. This particularly appealed to people who were going to have to sell soon and move into an old folks’ home. The same business fundamentals were involved: extremely low overhead and a minimum of labour and physical risk.

  Frank never cared any more for risk that Ed Oataway did. D.S. used to say that was why Frank never would have made it in legitimate business, where some customer would beat the shit out of you without any warning and you’d be sent home with no compensation, until you were healthy enough to go back to work. According to D.S., if the economy had as many downturns as he did personally, people would still be getting their groceries by sneaking up behind them and hitting them with a rock. When he first said that, Nina was on the verge of remarking, “Would you run that by me again?” but by then she’d been around D.S. long enough to realize life was too short.

  It was Frank’s negative attitude toward risk that made Nina think bank robbery was an extremely strange venture for him to undertake. But anybody who thought her opinion on this would have any effect on Frank’s plans, or Ed’s for that matter, was entirely out of touch. Frank had never been even slightly interested in his sister’s opinion about anything, or anybody else’s that she could think of. And Ed had by now definitely decided that Nina couldn’t be a bigger pain in the ass if she was triplets, and the only thing he was interested in hearing from her ever again was maybe a cry for help when a great big hole opened up in the ground and swallowed her and she disappeared forever. “I wouldn’t lift a fuckin’ finger,” he told D.S.

  D.S. said that was entirely up to Ed. After getting a face-full of hubcap that night, he’d decided that whatever was going on between Ed and Nina was their business and he was better off staying out of it.

  Then again, Frank had been locked up for three years, and who could say? Something could have happened to him the way it apparently sometimes did in jail. Nina didn’t know many people other than Ed and Frank who had ever done time. They weren’t all over the place in SuEz the way they were in the towers, where D.S. used to say there were three kinds of folks: the ones who just got out of jail; the ones who were in jail at the moment — probably this was the reason so many of the apartments were unoccupied; and finally the ones who were trying to think of something they could do that would get them sent to jail. Down where he and Nina and the girls lived, everybody was generally too busy doing whatever it took to get through the day to spend the time necessary to put together the sort of deal that would get the police tactical squad introducing itself by asking them to lean their hands against the wall and spread their legs. The chances of that weren’t quite as long as any of them entering their yacht in the next America’s Cup, but pretty close. Criminal-type things did occur, of course, but they were almost always unpremeditated.

  Nina said in those cases jail amounted to a big time out. Everybody got a chance to cool off, on top of which a convict could treat the time behind bars as a developmental experience, during which they could catch up on the movies they’d missed since the TV got stolen from their house. And there were some people who just plain benefited from the routine that went with being locked away. She looked straight at Merlina when she said this, although Merly believed it was because she was the only other person in the family who realized that her sisters didn’t know the meaning of responsibility.

  Frank was as good-looking as the guys in those Bud Light commercials. What he wasn’t, however, was anywhere near as ambitious as even the Bud Light guys. This was another thing that made his plan to hold up a bank sort of curious, because from the way Ed talked, it sounded as if there was more to it than simply getting out of jail and sticking up some branch in a plaza the way a person might if they happened to be walking by one and it occurred to them that since they were broke, they might as well whip in and rob it.

  The only time he ever had anything like ambition, it had led directly to winning what D.S. called a full scholarship to Hard-Time U. He wouldn’t have landed
in jail if he hadn’t gotten involved with a woman who was remarkable for a number of reasons that would also include, when he got out, being the registered owner of a five-hundred-thousand dollar Porsche sports car. To show how much he loved her — and this was maybe the most remarkable thing about this woman, because before meeting her, Frank was always entirely satisfied to let his girlfriends show how much they loved him — anyway, to show his love for her, he felt obliged to improve his financial standing. This led him to become a major operator, contracting to do high-end condominium developments, pave and landscape them, the whole deal. But other than make the numbers he quoted bigger, he didn’t even slightly change the approach he’d used to fleece old retired people. That’s why it didn’t take the individuals who were bankrolling these projects long to start asking themselves what was up with this guy. Unless he was some kind of mental case who was so far off his meds that he was flying at an altitude where even birds couldn’t breathe, then somebody must be shaking them down. And for some reason or other, whoever it was had sent this wiener to put his foot in the door. What made it really confusing was that they couldn’t figure out how this scheme Frank was fronting was supposed to pay off for whoever was behind it, because, as their accountants said when they got them to look at the estimates he’d given them, the whole thing was too stupid for words.

  Was Nina surprised? When it rained, did her roof leak? The way she looked at it, Frank was lucky he never got too many ideas, because whenever he came up with one, he’d just go with it. For instance, he’d never bothered to figure out that the difference between dealing with these people and with the old farts who made up his former clientele was that he should avoid irritating these people in any way at all. In fact, he should go to great lengths to keep them from feeling even a tiny itch.

  Nina said this was because of the way he processed information. When something useful blew into his head, there was no place for it to land, so it just blew around for awhile and blew out again, like a candy wrapper. The big money in these deals was unaware of this, however, and until Frank showed up, they were under the impression that they had paid off all the necessary interests so nobody would try to muscle in on their ventures. For their part, the necessary interests were under the impression that they were the only necessary interests, so they could relax, since the only thing they had to think about was how they could muscle the big money out and take over for themselves.