Nina, the Bandit Queen. Joey Slinger

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      “I don’t fuckin’ believe it.”

      “It doesn’t matter if you believe it,” JannaRose said. “It’s —”

      “It’s fuckin’ insane.”

      “Alessandra,” the truck was saying, when at last they could hear it plainly. “Come and get a Glacier Gloopster.” And, “Tyree, there’s a Choc-Sicle Swirler here for you. You come right over here and see.” And, “Crydell, you love Frostie-Fudgie. We’ve got an extra special one just for you today.…

      “Lewis … a Banana Daq-a-Quack.…

      “Thomas Junior … a Killer Blizzard.…

      “Shabatha … Ronell … Kirinette … a Mr. Nice Ice … a Slushnut Bar … an I Scream Dream.”

      Tootlety-tootlety-tootlety!

      “Katie … the Silver Shiver you’ve been wishing for …

      “Laraquinda … the Dilly Chiller you’ve been dreaming …

      “Robert James … Javier …

      “A Drool Cooler … a Purple Slurple …”

      When a name was called, the kid got pushed forward by excited little friends hoping their names would be next. But after a few seconds of embarrassment and pride that made them go all goose-pimply, being a celebrity became way more than they could bear. They ducked back into the crowd, light-headed with astonishment.

      Nina propped her hand against a car to keep from falling. Had a concrete block fallen out of the sky and landed on her head? If a concrete block fell out of the sky and landed on her head, would it feel different than this? Ice cream before breakfast! Simply thinking about it made her feel like throwing up. No it didn’t. It was thinking about it in those circumstances that did.

      “Naquacielo!” the voice barked. “Here’s a Razzle Dazzle Iceberg we worked all night making especially for you!”

      She half expected to see Naquacielo go floating up into the sky. Knots of children hovered, but still well back from the curb, like maybe they weren’t sure it wasn’t a dream and didn’t want to mess it up.

      “Is this legal?” she said.

      “Invasion of people’s privacy. There must be something like that,” JannaRose said. “My kids are going to go crazy.”

      Nina heard herself bark back at the truck. “Fuckers!”

      The truck’s own barking pulled more and more people out of bed. Heads poked from windows. The glass in the front doors of the apartment buildings had mostly been busted out, and kids ducked through where the bottom panels used to be. Racing out of houses, kids skidded to a stop like characters in cartoons, never quite going past the line where they would end up under the truck’s control, where they would have to put their money on the counter. Without looking, Nina knew that four little girls in their pyjamas had come out on her porch. Five little girls. The black one and Nina’s littlest, same size, same age — six — could be Velcroed together the way they kept their arms around each other every minute, every day. “Zanielle, you sleep any?” she called over her shoulder. Something about what was going on made her feel the need to emphasize how wide her open-armed maternity stretched. Both girls nodded without unfastening their eyes from the truck. “Fabreece, don’t you fall off that porch.”

      Fabreece was her littlest. Nina had wanted a break from names out of Camelot. Guinevere, Merlina, and Lady, short for Lady of the Lake — they were fourteen, twelve, and nine years old — had come along thirteen months apart and were supposed to stop there, but the idea of getting a vasectomy caused D.S. to faint every time it came into his mind, so he’d lied to her. And she’d believed him. Maybe all the sperm he’d pumped into her over the years had turned her brain to Cheez Whiz. So after Fabreece, she had the operation while D.S. huffed around saying he was going to go to court and sue that son-of-a-bitch doctor that did his. “You do that,” Nina had told him.

      The truck crept to a stop just shy of where she was standing. The tootlety music stopped. “I can’t get by,” the loudspeaker said. It was speaking directly to her, only it wasn’t the same voice that had been calling out the kids’ names and rhyming off the ice cream treats it had for them. That one sounded so official, it scraped the insides of Nina’s bones. This one sounded like one of the kids the ice cream was being pitched to. Through the windshield she could see the driver holding a microphone. The ice-cream selling voice must have come from a computer, one geared to something that could tell where all the kids lived and recognize them and measure their reactions.

      JannaRose said it probably involved a satellite.

      “The fuckers,” Nina said.

      The notable thing about this was, when the driver said he couldn’t get by, it hadn’t occurred to her that she was blocking the way.

      There was scrambling on the porch as D.S. came out, followed by stupefied silence as he gradually realized that his wife was in what looked like a standoff with an ice cream truck. “What’re you doing?” he yelped.

      The most notable thing of all, though, was that until D.S. started mouthing off at her, Nina wasn’t aware that she was doing anything.

      Two

      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 СКАЧАТЬ