JannaRose looked so close to sinking right into the ground that Nina stopped herself from saying, “So who the fuck are you to talk about writing some kind of fuckin’ letter?” Finally she just said, “I’ve got a feeling it would be a waste of time.” And again she stopped walking. Only this time, she stood completely still, not moving a muscle. An idea as hot as a welding rod had nailed her square in the forehead. “Because,” she said slowly, “because nobody,” she said, “listens to people like us.”
Nina closed her eyes, trying to get the idea cooled down and settled in one place. “So why bother trying to get somebody else to listen?” She grabbed JannaRose by the shoulders. “So why bother with anybody else at all?”
She started hopping up and down. “Who needs them?” she shouted. “Who needs them?”
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.
Five
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
