Mr. Nicks Skips Town
by SuniD
D.L.
Nicks plays hopscotch with the system since his dad died and his mom
bailed. He started skippin' along when he got pinched for a
now-and-later at Quick Shop on Spencer and Ninth. He asked the older
foster kids to buy it first. He checked the payphone for a quarter
second. The phone-book was gone and already-been-chewed gum jammed up
the slot. “Fair” was not in that boy's vocabulary. Nothing ever
was fair for him. That's why he needed that candy. He nabbed a green
one, unwrapped it going out the door, and barely had any saliva built
up before the clerk with hair pins and squinted eyes slapped him on
the back of the head and knocked the sour-apple right out of him. He
was five.
It
wasn't a phase neither. D.L. got better at being bad. He's downright
clever about lifting cars. He gets in smooth with a coat hanger
because jimmies are tailored to the model. Then he jumps the hot
rides across state lines. The Po-Po watch him drive into the sunset
of no jurisdiction and get crazy sinister mad. They catch him on the
street, try to pin the crime to the ass, but he's clean about it, and
tough to ID in a lineup. Each time he's convicted, a dozen other
charges are dropped.
The
cops have been soft to chase D.L. down only once or twice. Lieutenant
“Public Intox” Mathers poured evidence in the gutter on D.L.'s
last birthday. Mathers's m.o. is to hall in every minor present, slap
them with curfew, possession, loitering, conduct charges, and more if
he's bored. Mathers on the block means a big drunk-tank slumber party
till every parent gets called and D.L. has the cell to himself. But
this one time, Mathers is a blue Santa Claus, with one hand on his
gut to feel the baby kick and the other havin' teatime, tipping the
Jack up, and up, and up. Mathers says, “Happy seventeenth, Mr.
Nicks,” and chucks the bottle down an alley to smash the last drop.
A
month later, Mathers is just as sweet when he pins an assault charge
on D.L. and says he's an adult now in the eyes of the law. Hittin'
that boy was an adult decision, is how Mathers explains it. D.L. has
a few sheets on him already and more than one fight notched on his
belt. He gets two years, one if he's good. But no good can come of
it.
Sure,
D.L. jumps his transport. The big blue coat driving keeps looking in
the rear-view to squish D.L.'s head in his thumb and forefinger. He
says, “Don't make me come back there and do it for real,” a
couple of times. Well, he's cock-sure and all talk. When they stop at
a Diamond truck stop for D.L. to take a dump, the big blue gets
scared off by the squirts and moans coming from D.L.'s stall. With
the blue thug outside, D.L. get clothes, a cap, and a ten-minute head
start from the next trucker in exchange for the throne. He slips
right by big boy blue, hitches a ride from another driver, and
another, until he hops the southern border.
Here.
It's all in this postcard. That pretty senorita is gonna pin that
paper tail on that donkey. She gonna get kicked, but can't tell for
the blindfold. There, see, it's postmarked from Monterrey, Mexico,
dated D.L.'s eighteenth birthday, and signed, “Mr. Nicks.” Yeah,
that donkey in the sombrero got me, too. That D.L. cracks me up.
First Place Winner, Flash Fiction Slam. By Sunsine D. Dalton. Brazen Head 319 North 78th Street, Omaha, NE. 26 Apr. 2011. Performance.
