Nina, the Bandit Queen by Joey Slinger Page B

chunking noise — that was Guinevere, Merlina, and Lady. They only heard about it from Nina after Frank and the loot from the robbery both disappeared. Until she started reminiscing about it long afterwards, they could barely recall some of the other things — the voices yelling in the cellar, the threats, the smashed windows, some guy bouncing Nina’s head off the wall, her chopping the welfare inspector’s arm off. The back door, of course, they could all remember it not being there. It went missing right after Frank did and stayed that way for the rest of the time they lived in the house. Everybody remembered this very clearly, except for Fabreece. Her excuse was that she was too young to remember, but Merlina and Lady didn’t buy that. They believed it was because she never paid attention.
    The cellar door was bolted. Nina slid the bolt back, turned the knob, and pulled. Every hair on her body stood up. The hinges! Jesus Christ Almighty! The whole street would be jumping out of bed yelling “What the fuck —?”
    Chunk. Chunk.
    Chreech.
    The same noises. Whoever it was didn’t hear.
    She stuck her head through the opening. She couldn’t make out the stairs, the walls, anything. What would happen if she flipped on the light? Nothing. There was no bulb. Anybody going down the basement, even when some daylight seeped through the window, needed a flashlight. There was no flashlight. Those were two of the reasons nobody went down there.
    She listened closely. From here it sounded like the noise was coming from the back end of the house. And now that she had her head stuck through the doorway, it didn’t sound like it was coming from inside, either.
    More like near the back porch. Maybe under the back porch. Nina peeked through the window over the sink. The chunking came from right below it. She could yank the back door open, leap out on the porch, and yell, “Get away from here you fuckin’ sons of …” Or she could have, if there was still a back door. Instead there was a bunch of plastic drop cloths covering the opening where the door used to be, drop cloths somebody’d stuffed under the porch years ago, before Nina and her family moved in, that were caked with brittle paint and smelled like cat piss when they got wet. They had to have been there for years, because the only paint on anything inside the house was faded or peeling. Unless they’d been stolen and somebody ditched them there. Why would anybody steal gacked-up old drop cloths? Why would anybody steal the water out of the swimming pool? When the door disappeared, she had hauled them up and hung them in its place.
    The door had disappeared the night before. Not even Nina had heard anything when that happened. D.S. was amazed, because whoever stole it not only had to pry off the boards that had been nailed around it on the outside to keep people from going out and falling through the porch and hurting themselves, but had to come right into the kitchen to take it off the hinges. Who knew what else these people had done while they were in the house? “It’s like in the Bible,” D.S. said, “where it says that if you don’t have nothing then you need not fear a thief, for no thief will steal nothing.”
    He was telling everybody that those were words to live by when Nina said, “How on earth did we get so lucky?”
    While D.S. crinkled his forehead trying to figure out what she meant by that, Nina went back to thinking how amazing it was that nobody had been murdered and raped by the door thief while they were all asleep and helpless. And now here was this whatever it was, this chunking. That must be how she came to hear it — she hadn’t been sleeping very soundly because of what happened the night before.
    Through the kitchen window she saw flickering. Whoever was out there had some kind of light. And they were tunneling! It hit her like a runaway train. They were tunneling through the basement wall! Why wouldn’t they have just come in