Читать книгу Nina, the Bandit Queen - Joey Slinger - Страница 5

To go from being locked in a showdown with an ice cream truck to deciding to rob a bank wasn’t a straight line from A to B. It was more of a process. Some of the other things that went on between Nina and the ice cream truck that morning were also part of the process. So was the urgent need to raise money for local improvements and public works. This had to do with the swimming pool at the high school getting closed down. If she could get it reopened, it would be a good place for her daughters to burn off the aimless youthful energy that might otherwise lead them to become whores and crack addicts. This happened so often in SuEz that whenever it did, nobody was surprised. And then there was how she didn’t approve of stealing. Overcoming that obstacle was part of it, too.

But because she didn’t know anything at all about this process, which is understandable since it was only about to get rolling, and because she definitely had no idea that she was on the brink of getting swept up in it, when D.S. Dolgoy came out on the porch and saw her eyeball-to-eyeball with the ice cream truck in the middle of the street in front of their house and said, “What’re you doing?” she didn’t find it very helpful.

It didn’t lead her to give a little more thought to whatever it was she wasn’t aware she was doing. It didn’t throw a bucket of cold, clear reasonableness over her. It didn’t, because she knew that when he said, “What’re you doing?” it wasn’t D.S. asking a question. It was D.S. telling her, “Get the fuck off the street and stop making a fool of yourself.”

More to the point, she also knew that by “yourself,” he meant she was making a fool of him.

So there she was, not doing anything she was even aware of except being pissed off. And then she got told to stop doing it because it was embarrassing him. That was the thing that really pissed her off.

Fuck you, D.S.

She didn’t say it out loud, though, because children were present. At least he had the blond wig on the right way around. He looked ridiculous on the porch in it and her green nightie, which was a version of the disguise he’d come up with so the welfare inspectors wouldn’t figure out there was a male on the premises. He looked ridiculous in it everywhere, but not nearly as ridiculous as he looked when he got out of bed in a rush and the wig was turned around backwards. That looked idiotic, like he was peeking out through one of those Hawaiian hula dancer’s skirts. It made his daughters laugh until they peed their pants.

One thing she did know for sure was that JannaRose was right behind her. She didn’t even have to look around. Their friendship had reached a stage where she got subconscious signals. She always knew exactly where JannaRose was and what she was doing, the same as she always knew what she was wearing, although that wasn’t difficult. A T-shirt and sweats. They used to joke about these psychic powers of Nina’s. “Okay, how many orgasms did I have last night?” JannaRose would ask. “You mean real ones?” Nina would answer. It would start them laughing until they had to hold each other up.

“Stay right there.” Nina barely glanced around.

“What?”

“Don’t move.” Whether she’d done it consciously or not, JannaRose had drifted out into the middle of the street, and if she stayed right where she was, the truck was still blocked. Nina ran up the steps and yanked D.S.’s crutch out from under his arm. He didn’t particularly need it, since he was almost totally healed from the last time a customer beat him up, but he kept it around since he usually needed it several times a year. And even when he didn’t — when something happened that made him nervous, he leaned on it.

“What?” D.S. said, stumbling around. The girls shuffled to stay out of his way, something that wasn’t all that easy with everybody already sticking out over the edges of the porch. But they managed to do it without taking their eyes off the truck, which — it was obvious from the expressions on their faces — they knew was going to do something impossibly fabulous any second now, something far more fabulous than anything they had ever dared to dream of. They didn’t look as if they would survive the wait.

When Nina dashed back into the road holding the crutch near the bottom like it was an axe, it didn’t get through to her children that something else was going to happen instead. It didn’t even get through to them when she hauled the crutch back over her shoulder as if she was about to take a big swing at the windshield right in front of the driver. He was the only one who reacted in any way at all.

“Hey!” he said, in his amplified twelve-year-old voice, although now that Nina was getting a closer look, he seemed even younger.

“Get out of here,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“Go on. I’m counting to three.” She took a practice chop, swinging until the armpit-end of the crutch nearly touched the glass.

That was when something finally got through to the girls, something impossibly horrible, far more horrible than anything else would ever be in their whole lives. They squealed in agony. “What’s she doing?”

“What’re you doing?” It was D.S. again, only this time it really was a question. He was getting nervous, and she had his crutch out there when he needed it more than he ever had before.

The kid leaned his head out the side window. “I can’t hear what you’re saying,” he said.

Nina hauled the crutch back. “I said” — each word came out like it was a rock and she was heaving them to him one at a time — “get your truck off of this street.”

This seemed definitely okay with the kid. It was as if he’d already decided that this miserable street in the worst part of town wasn’t a place where he wanted to get into a big dispute. “You’ll have to get out of the way, then,” he said.

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,” she said.

“They’re wearing, like, football helmets.” JannaRose sounded as if it was the most amazing thing ever. “You see that?”