Nina, the Bandit Queen (4 page)

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.

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.

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 something 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.

“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.