Читать книгу Nina, the Bandit Queen - Joey Slinger - Страница 6

Not even Nina could say exactly when the idea of robbing a bank came to her, but it looks as if it was introduced into the process when the subject of robbing banks started coming up all the time in conversation. This happened after she concluded that the only way to stop the direct-sales ice cream truck permanently would be to organize an attack on the lot where the trucks were parked overnight. This would teach the ice cream company a lesson about the economic situation in SuEz in general, and in her house in particular.

She never passed up a chance to teach economic lessons along this line, although this was the first time it had occurred to her to reach beyond her immediate family and JannaRose, who usually didn’t mind as much as her children. It was hard to say which of her daughters was the whiniest, Guinevere or Merlina. But they whined in different ways. Gwinny whined about how everything that happened in the world was designed to ruin her life. Merly whined about things that Nina would have liked to do something about if she possibly could. She had no idea where to begin when it came to setting Gwinny straight, but with Merly she waded right in.

“We don’t have any money,” she said when Merly asked why they couldn’t at least once buy some things the ice cream company made exclusively for them.

“You always have a bit,” Merly said.

“But every day I somehow —”

“A little bit.”

“ — every day I somehow manage to come up with something for you to eat.”

“Today the truck is like, ‘Merlina, too bad you can’t have this fabulous Pecan Frosted Freeze-O-Reeno.’ That would have made me happy. You never think about making me happy.”

“I don’t want you to starve and get sick. So today I’ll find something else for you and for your sisters.”

“Who cares about them?”

“We all do.”

“Fuckin’ assholes.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“What did you just say?”

“Nothing.”

Not that worrying about Guinevere didn’t take up a lot of her time. Mainly it was because Gwinny lived so much in a dream world, even if her dreams kept bumping into the plain facts of SuEz, that it started Nina thinking about how, if the school pool was opened for kids in the summer, a lot of excess and dangerous energy could get burned off. But when she tried to talk to the authorities about it, they pointed out that the reason the pool wasn’t open the rest of the year either was that the filtration system and the heater and those kinds of things were so old and worn out that they didn’t work. Or they worked, but not up to the required standards, and had been condemned by the health department.

Things did start to happen, though. Immediately after Nina raised the subject, the pool’s windows and doors got boarded up. And that night somebody stole the boards. Then the windows got stolen, and the doors, and more boards got put over the openings, and those boards got stolen. All the stuff inside got stolen: the lifeguard’s tall chair, the safety equipment, the benches, the folding bleachers, the scoreboard from when there had been swim meets, the clock-timers, the glass out of the pool office window, the office furniture. Then the heating equipment and the filtration system. Those were substantial items. Nobody could just walk away with them. It was after the big ventilators got stolen off the roof that the windows and doors got bricked up, and this was why whoever stole the water had to smash their way through with a sledgehammer.

The ice cream truck was starting to insult the girls personally. They were getting bored and crabby and it wasn’t even summer yet. Guinevere was already fourteen, and the word was that lots of girls that age, although if it was girls everywhere or just in SuEz wasn’t clear — anyway, Nina heard they gave out blowjobs like she didn’t know what.

She was talking about this to JannaRose, about how she’d sat Gwinny down. “And I told her that oral you-knows would —”

“Oral you-knows?”

“Oral you-knows. It’s not easy to come out and say some things to your fourteen-year-old daughter.”

“What’d she say?”

“She said, ‘You mean blowjobs?’”

“My goodness,” JannaRose said.

“Fuck you, too,” Nina replied.

“At least they’re better than getting knocked up.”

“No! Yes! No, I’d just rather she … why can’t … that she —”

“Good luck,” JannaRose said.

“So you know what she said then? She said, ‘At least with blowjobs you don’t get pregnant.’”

“I cannot believe it.”

“The point is,” Nina said, not wanting JannaRose to get the impression she was a moron, “if somebody started giving blowjobs all over the place, guys would get really interested and start taking her here and there. And the next thing anybody knew, she’d be up in the towers working for a living.” So many apartments in the towers were empty and had been taken over by drug dealers and whores that she sometimes doubted there were any that people just lived in.

“You think it might be a nutrition thing?” JannaRose said. “If all we give our kids to eat is potato chips, it might not be the thing they need to grow up to be astronauts.”

Nina stared at her for a long time, but JannaRose was looking down, trying to smooth her T-shirt over her stomach, and didn’t notice. Finally, Nina gave up. “So,” she said, “it would probably be good to find something to keep her mind off it.”

JannaRose wasn’t entirely distracted, though. “Like swimming?” she said.

Nina bristled. “You don’t have to say it like that.”

“I didn’t say it like anything.” JannaRose’s voice took on a flinty edge. “I just said it.”

Nina let it drop. It wasn’t that she didn’t realize that maybe it wasn’t the ideal solution. She realized it wasn’t whenever she said it to herself. Even when she said it to herself, it sounded like she was a moron.

Ed Oataway never did understand why his family car had featured so prominently in whatever happened with JannaRose and Dipshit Dolgoy’s idiot wife at the lot where the ice cream company parked its trucks. In fact, he’d never managed to figure out anything about what went on down there, and nobody was about to tell him. It was the same with D.S. Even Nina had eventually realized that the thing she herself originally thought was the point didn’t cover everything that actually happened that night. Not when she added it all together. And to be perfectly honest, she really hadn’t expected to accomplish anything. What she’d expected was the same as she expected with everything she ever did before: not much. There hadn’t been a day in her life when it occurred to her to expect very much of anything, and nothing had come along to cause her to think otherwise. Then here, by accident, she’d driven off toward the ice cream company, and what happened turned out to be as far from not accomplishing anything as was possible. It was so different from everything else she’d ever done that it got her started examining a lot of things about her life that up till then she’d thought were basically no use at all.

What happened in the ice cream company parking lot wasn’t really very hard to describe. On the other hand, it was terrifyingly complicated.

What happened was, she created an absolute shitstorm.

Ed Oataway’s family car was complicated enough to begin with. Ed had refined his trade to where he only stole cars from people who paid to have them stolen. They did this for insurance purposes. He liked the work. There was no competition, and obviously no one was interested in calling the cops in the middle of one of his daring daylight vehicular extractions, as he called them. This meant stress was non-existent. He collected a percentage of what the individual whose car he stole paid for the job, and he held on to the car until what he referred to as the parent organization hauled it away, he figured, for the international junk trade. It was a nice little business. And it was because of the stresslessness that he’d started considering whichever of these cars happened to be waiting for trans-shipment in front of his house to be the Oataway family car. So he didn’t mind if JannaRose used it to go buy potato chips for the kids’ supper. Neither did he mind if she got Nina to drive for her, since JannaRose didn’t have a licence and got nervous driving a car with such imprecise ownership.

The one available for the assault on the ice cream company was an old brown Pontiac that was in such terrible shape, it wouldn’t even begin to turn until the steering wheel got cranked a quarter of the way around. Nina said just keeping it in a straight line was like wrestling with somebody who was having a shit fit. All the way to the ice cream factory she kept wanting to grab JannaRose by the arm and yell, “Why would anybody steal this fuckin’ thing?” What kept her from doing it was that JannaRose was already so spooked by the feeling that something awful was going to happen that it would have really upset her. When Nina considered how nervous she was herself, she didn’t want to push things any farther than she secretly planned to push them.

“What are you doing?” JannaRose’s voice sounded quavery as they passed the parking lot full of ice cream trucks for the second time.

“I told you. Looking.” Nina hauled this way and that on the steering wheel and bounced off the curb a couple of times when she finally pulled over. She got out and tried the gate. It didn’t budge. Back in the car, she glared at the fence.

“I was just thinking,” JannaRose said.

Nina glared at JannaRose.

“I was just,” JannaRose said again, “thinking that here, wherever we are, in some part of town we’ve never been before — that if something happened. And we got killed and they stole all our stuff. How will anybody know it’s our bodies?”

Nina glared at the fence.

“They sometimes use dental records, don’t they?” JannaRose said. “I saw it on television.”

That was when Nina decided that for sure it wasn’t a scouting expedition. They were going to go ahead and do it. They might never get another chance.

“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.