Nina, the Bandit Queen. Joey Slinger

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ