Nina, the Bandit Queen

by Joey Slinger

  The loot wasn’t in her house. She knew that. However, not everybody knew she knew it, or if they had known, they wouldn’t have believed her. This explained why the whole back wall was off. Why her and D.S.’s bedroom no longer had a roof. And why the kitchen didn’t either. When the mystery home wreckers tore off half a side wall, the roof over the girls’ bedroom collapsed. She moved them across the street into JannaRose’s, except for Fabreece. Fabreece went to Jarmeel’s to be with Zanielle. D.S. refused to sleep in the house, claiming it was impossible because the wreckers sometimes worked all night. He started spending nights in abandoned cars along the street. Everybody he knew told him it was too bad he had to do that, but unfortunately they had some problem or other with their house that made it impossible for him to bunk in with them. He said that was okay, he hated using somebody else’s bathroom. Lady said that wasn’t the real reason. She said it was really so he could move to a different car every night, which made it harder for the wreckers to find him when they decided to murder what was left of the family, having already disposed of Frank. When Nina screamed down the stairs that the wreckers had been scaring her children and had forced her family to move out, they yelled back, “Hey! Shut the fuck up or you’ll be really fuckin’ sorry.”

  She didn’t know for absolute certain that the money wasn’t in the house, but it was so logical it had to be true. Why would Frank hide 1.18 million there when he knew the next time he showed up the house might not be standing, as she’d known from the day they moved in that it might not be the next time she showed up? Look at what was happening at that very moment, and it wasn’t even the city or developers.

  And while the wreckers weren’t about to believe anything she would have told them, she got exactly the same feeling when she explained to JannaRose, or to D.S. for that matter, that Frank hadn’t been in the house long enough to hide anything. Not in a serious way, at least. He might have stuffed it behind the fridge, but what the hell. As a matter of fact, the Nike bag he brought was beside the fridge, where he’d tossed it when they went outside to see what was going on with all the bees flying over. They could hardly hear each other for the noise that filled the sky. It went up and down her backbone like a whole bunch of nailfiles. And the Nike bag still looked just as empty as it had when he’d arrived with it. But no matter how many times she went over this with JannaRose or D.S., they would nod as if they completely agreed with her views on the subject, but their faces gave the impression that they where thinking, “Well, yeah, I guess that might be possible.” When Ed Oataway examined the bag a few days after Frank disappeared, he took for granted that it had been emptied after Frank arrived at Dipshit’s house. He spent a lot of time trying to figure out how this might have happened, if it had happened after he stole the back door, and who had done it.

  The thing that worried Nina most, though, was Guinevere, who didn’t seem to be handling even the survival part of life very well. Merlina explained to Lady that this was because Gwinny was an idiot, and the main reason she was had to do with her only being interested in getting on everybody’s nerves because it was taking her so long to be a big star of some kind or other. She couldn’t stand it that she wasn’t on the covers of any of the magazines she stole from the Korean’s store. What drove Nina crazy was that she was always huddled someplace snerfling. She had to share a room! Big fuckin’ deal. Everybody had to share a room. Nina had never not shared a room. It was true that the room Gwinny shared at that moment was at JannaRose’s, but the kids she shared it with were pretty much the same ones she usually did. And even when the room she shared before this was in her own house, it wasn’t a house they’d lived in for long. They didn’t even pay rent or anything. They’d just moved in. They were always going to get kicked out. The bastards who were wrecking them out of it were changing the timing, that was all, and probably not by much.

  It was also true that Nina had never had much of an idea about how to comfort somebody, or maybe what to comfort somebody about when things were exactly the same as they’d been for her. Merlina told Lady the main reason the two of them did okay was that they didn’t bother dreaming, but Lady said she wasn’t too sure about that. Sometimes she dreamed whether she wanted to or not. The night before she’d had a dream about truck racing. Merlina said what she meant was they didn’t waste time dreaming about what their future would be like, but Lady said if her future was that she was going to be a racing-truck driver, that was okay with her. Merlina said Lady was an idiot, too, but a different kind than Gwinny, who was one of those high-strung people who caused difficulties for everybody around them even if they had to go out of their way to do it. Maybe she couldn’t help it. Maybe she had some kind of a thing in her system that would land her in a mental hospital some day.

  Finally Nina couldn’t take the screeching and emotional tension any more. She grabbed Gwinny and yelled, “What is your fuckin’ problem anyway? Do you think it’s different for anybody else in this family?” Then she nearly died of shock because Gwinny doubled over, vomited bright red and collapsed to her knees with her arms wrapped around her tummy.

  “She’s puking blood! Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ!”

  Nina and Gwinny were out on the walk, but Merlina and Lady could see from the front window that what she had vomited was the fifteen sticks of red licorice she had just stuffed into her face without offering even one to anybody else. “It comes out different colours when she eats different-coloured stuff,” Lady said.

  They kept watching while Nina knelt and hugged their sister really hard. Between shrieks, Gwinny said she was sorry. That she was sorry most of all because of what happened to Frank. “We shouldn’t have done it,” she said.

  Nina narrowed her eyes. Something was missing there. “What shouldn’t you have done?”

  Gwinny just shook her head above the bright red puddle.

  “What did you do, Gwinny?”

  “Robbed him.”

  “I can’t hear you. Did you say you —”

  “She’s a real, real bitch,” Merlina said to Lady. What they could hear through the closed window wasn’t very loud, but it was clear.

  “ — robbed him?”

  Lady looked at Merlina. “You were like ‘Its okay to take it, he’s our uncle,’” she said.

  “Shut up,” Merlina whispered, because she didn’t want Nina and Gwinny to know they were spying.

  “Yes,” Gwinny said. She started trembling, and her voice sounded the way it did when she was really frightened. “We diiiiid!” Then she stood abruptly and ran up the street in the direction of the towers.

  JannaRose, who’d been watching from her place, came over and squatted by Nina. Nina had no idea if JannaRose had heard what Gwinny said, but it had started her own mind surging.

  What on earth could Gwinny and her sisters …

  In his whole life Frank never had anything worth …

  Except when …

  Except the one and only time when …

  But how ridiculous can you …

  Except he did show up carrying that Nike bag, and for all I …

  The bag’s still beside the fridge, as empty as …

  So Gwinny …

  And her sisters …

  So Gwinny and her sisters …

  Her eyes grew huge and wide. “Holy fuck.”

  She wasn’t whispering. It was just that her voice would only come out very small.

  JannaRose stood and twisted this way and that. She wasn’t built to squat any more. “What’d you say?” she said.

  “Gwinny — the kids — they stole something.”

  JannaRose didn’t move. Didn’t blink. Didn’t do anything. It wasn’t as if, because of what Nina said, she wanted to stand totally still so she wouldn’t jiggle the idea around before she got it completely installed in her mind. It was that telling a woman who grew up in SuEz — you having grown up in SuEz yourself — it was that telling this woman that your kids, who at that very moment were growing up in SuEz, had been st
ealing was as close as you could get to telling her the sky was straight up there, over her head.

  “They get caught or something?” It was the only rational thing to say. It was what anybody who knew Nina would have said.

  “No. Gwinny told me.”

  Which left JannaRose with absolutely nothing to say at all. So they stood there not saying anything, until after awhile Nina said, not so much to JannaRose, but as if she was going over the details in her own mind to make sure she had them straight, “From Frank.”

  JannaRose’s head snapped back as if at last, after five hundred years of incomprehension, somebody had said something in the only language she happened to speak.

  “Holy fuck,” she said in a low voice.

  “Yeah,” Nina said.

  They looked up the street, as if wondering where Gwinny had disappeared to. But they didn’t really look at anything. They just stood there, stunned. That’s what they were doing when Gwinny whipped around the corner of the house next door, the expression on her face about what Merlina would have expected to see on the face of a fourteen-year-old who had finally figured out how to get rid of the guilt that had been destroying her personal esteem. All she had to do was rat her sisters out. And it turned out it wasn’t a big problem. Already she felt a whole lot better.

  “Here,” she said.

  “Here?”

  “What we took.”

  Nina and JannaRose weren’t exactly certain what 1.18 million dollars would look like, but sort of expected something more than Frank’s shiny old leather wallet that was curved in the shape of his butt. JannaRose later told Ed Oataway it was as if a magician said he was going to pull a rabbit out of a hat, and then pulled out — Tah-da!! — nothing. Not a goddamn thing. Except for his hand, and it was every bit as empty as when he stuck it into the hat.

  Gwinny gave it to Nina.

  JannaRose laughed. Taking the wallet from Nina, she made a jokey show of weighing it. “Was there millions of dollars in it, honey?”

  “I don’t know.”

  As far as Nina was concerned, everything was starting to feel quite a bit stranger than whatever had happened just before it, which, whatever it was, had been really strange. “You don’t know?”

  Gwinny shook her head.

  “You stole the wallet and didn’t notice how much money was in it?”

  “It wasn’t me that stole it.”

  Merlina saw that when it came to sticking up for Merlina, one person in particular wasn’t going to. “Fuck you, Gwinny!” she shouted, running out on the porch. “And who stood there and watched me? And who wasn’t like, ‘Don’t do that!’ or a single other fuckin’ word?”

  “What’s going on?” Nina said.

  “It was sticking out of his pocket when he was sitting in the kitchen,” Merlina said. “All bulging way out.”

  “Yeah?”

  “And it accidentally got nudged when I —”

  “It accidentally got nudged?”

  “ — accidentally when I gave him a hug, and it fell on the floor.”

  Nobody moved for a minute or so. If a bee had flown over right then, nobody would have heard it because they were thinking too hard.

  “So was there any money in it before you gave it to your sister?”

  “She didn’t give it to me.”

  “What?” Nina and JannaRose said it at the same time.

  “She sold it to me.”

  Nina’s glare was so ferocious that Merlina backed up. Nina kept glaring at her even when she was speaking to somebody else. “I didn’t even look for money in it,” Merly said, really fast. “I didn’t know anything about any money.”

  “So why did you buy it, Gwinny? And what did you buy it with?”

  “Things she wanted me to steal —”

  “Things she wanted you to steal —”

  “ — from the Korean’s store.” Gwinny’s eyes were shut so tight, her whole face was squeezed together. It was as if she expected Nina to smack her.

  “What did she want you —”

  “You really are a dumb fuck, Gwinny,” Merlina said.

  “Shut your mouth, you!” It wasn’t until then that Nina took her eyes off Merlina and looked at Guinevere. “What did she want you to steal?”

  “Nothing,” Merlina yelled. “Some bubble gum.”

  “Excuse me,” JannaRose said, and everybody turned toward her, as if relieved by the interruption. “Before I lose track here.” She brushed some lint off Gwinny’s shoulder. “So why,” she said, “did you want to buy the wallet? When neither of you knew if there was any money in it or not?”

  “I thought …”

  JannaRose nodded to keep her going.

  “She said …”

  “What did she say, honey?”

  “There was a condom in it.”

  “Why don’t you just stab me right in the fuckin’ heart?” Nina said, expecting her eyes to fill with tears, but they didn’t.

  “A condom?” JannaRose sounded like she couldn’t believe what she’d just heard. “No. Condoms leave a round mark, like —”

  “Don’t you fuckin’ tell her anything!”

  “ — like a big O.” JannaRose squeezed the wallet, looking very doubtful. “This doesn’t —”

  “I know.”

  “She knows!” Nina massaged her forehead. “Of course she knows. Why wouldn’t she know? Everybody fuckin’ knows. Fabreece probably knows.”

  JannaRose unsnapped a fastener and tipped out something that was wrapped in aluminum foil. “You thought this was a condom?”

  “Merly’s like, ‘This in here is a condom,’” Gwinny said.

  Nina grabbed the little aluminum foil package from JannaRose and waved it at Merlina. “Did you think this was a condom?” she said.

  “I’ve never seen one,” Merlina said. “It could have been.”

  “So why didn’t you open it?” Nina said, unfolding the foil.

  “I didn’t want to touch it,” Merlina said.

  “Who wants to touch a condom with their fingers? Ewww!” It was Lady. Merlina looked astounded. Her sister was backing her up. It was the first time ever.

  “So,” Nina’s nose was about half an inch from Gwinny’s, “you know everything about condoms, but you didn’t know what this is?” She held up the key that had been wrapped in the aluminum foil.

  “I know what it is,” Gwinny yelled, like she’d had enough insults.

  “I never knew what it was really,” Merlina yelled, trying to make it sound as if she didn’t know what it was when she sold it to Gwinny.

  “I never saw any money,” Lady yelled, but Nina just walked up the steps and into the house. “We never took any! We never knew about it!”

  Nina went into the bathroom because the door still had a lock. She locked it. She opened the fist holding the key and read the name on the emblem. She’d never known for sure how you say it. Porsh? Porsh-uh?

  Nineteen

  L. Roy and L. Ray Elwell were identical twins. “We’ve been twins for seventy-one years,” one of them would say.

  “Since we turned five,” the other would come in with. “Before that we didn’t look the least bit alike.”

  “In fact, we weren’t even related.”

  “Those were the good old days.”

  “Tell the truth, would you want to look like him?” And they’d point at each other and laugh their asses off. There was nothing L. Roy and L. Ray enjoyed more than their little jokes, and they’d been enjoying that one, and updating it, for a long, long time.

  They called their operation a “service centre.” This was another one of their jokes. It was actually a chop shop that everybody else just called Elwell’s. There was no sign on it. They’d inherited it from their father. They’d learned how to be mechanics from the men who worked for him. From him they learned how to run a business, which he’d done by sitting in his office on the front seat out of a 1949 Hudson Hornet and listening to the radio until it was time to go home and l
isten to the radio. There had been changes around Elwell’s since then. Now L. Roy and L. Ray sat on the front seats — they each had one, they were bench seats — out of 1974 Dodge Dusters, watching TV until it was time to go home and watch TV.

  Another change was that nobody worked for them. They rented out service bays and hoists to mechanics who ran their own operations. Some had been at Elwell’s for years and had many clients. Some only needed a place to work on a car for a couple of hours, often late at night. Some had their own tools, some rented what they needed from L. Roy and L. Ray. Frank Carson was just a little kid when he started hanging around. That’s all he did for a long time, hang around. It was all he did anywhere, since he didn’t go to school much, but Elwell’s was where he did it the most. Nobody there minded. He was quiet and always happy to run out for cigarettes or coffee or whatever. By the time he was a teenager he was sweeping floors, jockeying cars. Taking them apart and putting them together again, though — that’s what turned him on. His ability to do it impressed everybody around the place. The thing was, it was the only thing that turned him on, not being particularly interested in girls at that age either, and L. Roy and L. Ray found this the slightest bit peculiar.

  “He was like a classical piano virtuoso that only wanted to fool around with the piano’s insides,” L. Roy said.

  “What would an old bullshit hound like you know about classical piano virtuosos?” asked his brother.

  “Old and cultured bullshit hound,” L. Roy replied.

  “The only thing that was ever cultured about you,” L. Ray said, “was the specimen the doctor sent to the lab to see if you got the clap from Phyllis Whatsername.”

  “Fennaty. Phyllis Fennaty. And it turned out I wasn’t the one that got it. Not that I was surprised. I couldn’t believe anybody would’ve touched her that didn’t have a dick made out of asbestos.”

  “That was always the way,” L. Ray nodded sadly. “Left the dirty work to me.”

  Not that the Elwell brothers didn’t appreciate that there was something attractive in how the parts of a car fit together and worked, but if it was going to hold their attention for long, taking cars apart and putting them together again needed a purpose beyond the simple pleasure of doing it. Such as money, for instance. Doing it for money was a real good purpose, to their way of thinking. So what was with this kid?