and the girls would get evicted for not paying the rent if the cheques didn’t start coming soon. They already didn’t pay rent. And nobody was going to bother evicting them, since the bulldozer was about to knock the house down to make way for apartment buildings. For all she knew, it had happened while she was away phoning the welfare department.
The last time she got an actual cheque and had turned it into actual cash, she’d taken snippets of the money and hidden them around the house to keep D.S. from finding it in one lump sum and spending it on god knows what. Last night she’d been up till all hours looking for some of those hiding places, figuring maybe she hadn’t found them all, since she was sure she’d hidden more money than she’d been able to track down so far, which was none. Not being able to find even fifty cents made her start to panic — her chest got tight, her ears filled with a buzzy, tingling sound. She searched the whole house twice more before giving up. If she hadn’t given up, she was going to start ripping out the baseboards. That would have been poke-your-own-eyes-out insanity, because she knew she hadn’t done anything like rip the baseboards off to hide it in the first place. Still, the feeling weighed on her that when she got home, she was going to turn the place inside out again.
Walking home from the towers, she squinted at their rooflines. She couldn’t hear any bees, although maybe it was impossible right down there. It could be they had to travel a ways before they started making the noise that sounded like a sheet being torn in half. Or it could be there weren’t any at the moment. Neither she nor JannaRose bought for one minute the idea some people had that there weren’t any at all, that they were one of those urban myths. She and JannaRose mostly heard them when they lay in bed at night, unable to sleep. D.S. used to say he didn’t believe they existed, because why would anybody fire high-powered rounds over SuEz and not aim them anywhere else in the city? If bullets were flying over the rest of town, there would be big complaints. Nobody else would stand for it. The police would be all over the place. Although most of the people in Nina’s house said afterwards that they didn’t remember, she knew full well a lot of them heard them when Frank showed up the night after he got out of jail. That’s why they’d all gone outside and stared into the black sky: those ripping noises. More bees at one time than she’d ever heard. Maybe it had gotten blotted out of their memories by the shock of realizing it was the last time any of them ever laid eyes on her brother.
She slumped along, wondering if, even though you couldn’t hear bee noises this close to the towers, you wouldn’t at least hear some other noises associated with them that maybe didn’t carry as far as her house. Then she turned around so suddenly that JannaRose almost crashed head-on into her.
“Why would anybody steal the water?” The question came right out of the blue and wiped out everything else she’d been thinking.
“What water?” JannaRose said.
“The pool water.”
“What pool?”
“The high school pool. What fuckin’ pool did you think?”
“Somebody stole the water?”
Nina tried to collect her thoughts. Stealing water made sense. As much sense as stealing anything else did. Oh, no it didn’t. Not this water. This wasn’t ordinary water. Steal ordinary water, sure. Put it in plastic bottles. Sell it to fuckin’ idiots. Make a fuckin’ fortune. Lots of people do that. She was always telling the girls, drink it out of the tap. “It’s not the same!” Get an empty plastic bottle, fill it with water out of the tap. “It’s not the same!” Who’ll know? “It’s not the same!” It’s the fuckin’ same. “It’s not the same!”
This wasn’t the same. This was swimming pool water. Water out of the swimming pool. It was filthy. When she thought how filthy it was, it made her want to puke. It was water people had pissed in! It wasn’t even fresh filthy water. It had been there since the pool got shut down — what? Two years ago? All she could remember was how bad everybody stank when they came out of that water. She wouldn’t swim in it. She wouldn’t have let her girls swim in it.
JannaRose tried to suggest possible natural causes. “Maybe the pool got a crack in it? Could be it leaked away. Could be there was an earthquake.”
Nina laughed. She couldn’t believe anybody could be so dumb.
“So what happened, then?” JannaRose asked.
“They smashed a hole in the wall. Ran in a hose. Pumped it into a truck.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s obvious.”
“Why is it obvious?”
“Because they couldn’t haul it all away without a truck.”
They started walking again, and for a long time neither of them said anything. Somehow it was a heavier kind of silence than Nina was accustomed to. She was already feeling guilty for having gone apeshit about the stolen water and implying that JannaRose wasn’t terrifically bright for not being as aware of the pool situation as she should have been. This had come right after JannaRose showed how sweet and loyal a friend she was — spending almost two days keeping Nina company while she phoned to try and get action out of the welfare department. It was to lighten this uncomfortable atmosphere that she decided to pass along a humorous sidelight to their attack on the ice cream company that only she knew about. It would make JannaRose laugh and feel better about everything. It even related to a conversation Nina had actually considered having with JannaRose on their way to the ice cream factory, a conversation about Tampax and the possibility of using some to blow up one of the trucks. But what with one thing and another —
“Tampax?” JannaRose looked stunned, although nowhere near as stunned as she would be when she thought about the significance of what Nina was saying in terms of their unspoken pact that they told each other everything the minute it crossed their minds.
“Wouldn’t it have been something?” Nina said.
“The fuck do you mean Tampax?”
“Strung together,” Nina said. “I could’ve slid them down into the gas tank of an ice cream truck. Once they got soaked with gas, I’d light the end. Boom! I had a bunch of them already tied together in my pocket.”
“You told me you didn’t even plan the thing with Ed’s car. That it came to you out of nowhere. That we were just on a scouting expedition.”
“Yeah. This was just in case.”
“Just in case?”
What did this all mean? Could it be that from the start, from when they pulled away from JannaRose’s house, Nina had known that if she couldn’t get the gate unlocked, she’d bust it down with the Pontiac, pull out her Tampax string, and blow up an ice cream truck? Read between the lines and could it be you’d see how she had it all worked out? Read between the lines and could it be you’d see that Nina didn’t count on JannaRose in every situation? Maybe it would be a good idea if she was a little more careful about Nina in certain circumstances. “Maybe” — she grabbed Nina’s sleeve — “maybe it’d be a lot safer for everybody if we just wrote a letter to the mayor or somebody.”
Nina blinked a very slow blink. “A letter?”
“About the ice cream company. About getting them to stop calling out the kids’ names and putting pressure on everybody.”
“You ever write a letter?”
JannaRose
