one

Royal Bell was smoking and stroking. He repeated the phrase in his head-smoking and stroking-then said it out loud, hissing the sibilants, as if he were on stage.
“Smoking and stroking!”
He liked the way it came out, so he said it again, putting more emphasis on the first syllable of the last word:
“Smoking and stroking!”
He described his condition this way when he had reached a state in which he was worked up, kinetic, hitting on all cylinders, on a mission. Today, he was all of these. He was on a particular mission because one of his children had recently contracted lead poisoning, and Royal had been doing some reading about it this morning. He had been doing the reading at a computer terminal in the Franklin Library, a moldy tan brick building that squatted along Phillips Street, an east-west strip of asphalt that cut straight through the Franklin Neighborhood of Mill City.
The websites he had just visited all noted that lead was a metal, a metal that was foreign to the body and poisonous. He had found that lead was used as a pigment in house paint years ago, and that now when that old paint started to chip and flake it was hazardous, especially to young children, like his kid. The stuff messed up their brains and nervous systems, cognitive development, whatever that meant.
But what had really caught his attention were some articles about lawsuits, lawsuits that tenants had filed against their landlords and their insurance companies. These had resulted in settlements being made to the affected families, not chickenfeed, either, but big money, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Several ads from lawyers wanting to represent lead-poisoned kids had popped up while he was perusing websites, three of them local. He copied their telephone numbers using one of the stubby pencils and a small square of paper he found at the reference desk.
Now he was striding along Phillips Street, occasionally glancing down at the numbers on the piece of paper in his hand. The coarse graphite lettering glistened like silver in the bright morning sun.
“What’s up man?”
Royal looked up and saw Easy, one of the neighborhood denizens, a man Royal would occasionally party with. Easy was leaning up against the corner of a vacant brick building, looking at him with a slight smile, like he could see that Royal was up to something and he would like to know what it was. Royal slowed a bit.
“Nothin’s up, my man! Just got some juicing to do, you know how it is.”
Royal would have loved to tell him that he had just come into some money, but he was going to save that, save it until he was driving his rig down Phillips Avenue, maybe a big black SUV with spinner hubcaps, the kind that rotated backwards, throwing sparkling reflections at all the passersby, showing that he was the man now.
“Can’t visit right now. Royal’s got some business to do!”
He resumed his brisk walk.
“Yeah, you got business, all right, nigger!”
Easy called after him, but Royal was already half a block away, anxious to get to his ex-wife’s house, anxious to see about his kid.
He thought some more about the big black car. Yeah, then the suckahs would know that he was no ordinary nigger, no sir. They’d know that Royal had been well named. He would park his car in the strip mall parking lot all shiny and nice and then they would come over to admire it and stoop and bow and ask him for favors or money and sometimes he might give someone a bit, maybe if they polished the car a little. And the women! Hell, they’d be all over him, like flies on honey. Royal could feel his love hammer swelling against his tight underwear as he thought about the good times he was going to have.
He arrived at Ellion Avenue and turned south. Four blocks would see him at his wife’s house. He didn’t look forward to seeing her. She was a crazy red-bone from Haiti, a bitch he had married in a moment of weakness after she had their first child, a boy they named Dukane. He had met her when he was doing some acting at a neighborhood theater and she had knocked him out at first, with her island accent and those French phrases she could throw around. It sounded real good onstage, but he found that offstage, the bitch was worthless and dangerous besides, especially after she had thrown a knife at him during one particularly active argument. It wasn’t long after that incident that he moved out, but not before he had impregnated her once more and she had given birth to a girl. They named her Jonkwill. He had left the family to get along on AFDC.
He made some money doing theater work with United Resources, a neighborhood self-help group. They called it a stipend and he kept all of it. Shit, his wife got all she needed from the county. The work wasn’t too hard, going to focus groups and acting in a play now and then and pretending to be trying to get a job. And he had to talk to a white guy once every two weeks, a square shooter who came in from the suburbs and did volunteer work for United Resources. The guy called himself a mentor. Royal understood that to mean that the dude was supposed to be teaching him something, but hell, Royal could teach him a thing or two. He laughed at the thought of the meetings, when he’d do his shuck and jive bullshit, sincere as hell and talking about getting ahead and the man eating it up.
Royal gave out a sigh, thinking of the mess he was going to see, toys and shit all over the floor, garbage not taken out, dishes not washed. He liked it better in his room at the group house. There he could hang his clothes up neatly in a closet, put his shoes on the floor in dust covers, place folded shirts into a tallboy dresser that he had liberated from an alley behind a furniture store, and go to sleep between clean sheets.
But now, he was getting close to the house.

Copyright 2009, Brian T. Olson. All rights reserved.