Street Metals

“Son of a sow!” Malik punctuated his substitute for profanity by lightly punching the steering wheel of the truck he was driving as he squinted to read the highway sign up ahead which explained the various amenities that may be available at the next rest stop. His stomach automatically growled because besides the two Slim Jims from earlier that morning, Malik hadn’t consumed anything of actual sustenance since he left the crime scene.

And he just then realized that the burner phone given to him in the first to go bag he received when he was ushered out of state to the safe house which was no longer safe, had all his contacts in there. Malik cussed and sighed.

Luckily for him, his house phone number whether it was temporarily disconnected or not, stayed the same since he was old enough to drag a dining room chair into the kitchen to call the ambulance after seeing his mother, Stacey, collapse on the floor.

Malik was three years old at the time, and when he would shed his shame long enough to re-tell the story about saving his mother’s life, at first his friends didn’t believe him. They roasted him for lying about being able to read at such a young age. It was Stacey herself who stood up for her son and told anyone who would listen that Malik would read anything he could get his hands on from cereal boxes to shampoo bottles. He couldn’t pronounce half of the words most of the time, but he tried.

Legend has it, Stacey, partly because of her habit, partly because she was a nervous new mother would keep Malik in his tiny car seat and place in in front of the old floor console television in the front room and turn on PBS from the time Captain Noah came on, through Sesame Street, Mister Rogers Neighborhood, Electric Company, and a show called Zoom. After that show, there was a program Malik never got to watch. Even as a child that upset him, because the show’s intro was filled with people in large colorful furry costumes riding rides in an amusement park. It was then and only then, Stacey would take Malik out of the car seat and put him in his crib. Even as a small baby he could recognize the yellow and green turtles on his sheets were sleeping and nine times out of ten for whatever reason, it coerced him into a nap while his mother watched her stories and chain smoked cigarettes.

But it wasn’t until Stacey took him to a free clinic to keep his vaccinations up to date that she found out how exceptionally intelligent Malik was. He absorbed everything like a sponge. So when Stacey took him out of his car seat and allowed him to walk with those hard sole shoes across the crinkly paper on the exam room table, he had the audacity to read the framed newspaper articles that were on the exam room wall. One would have thought it would have encouraged her to enroll Malik in a special school, but it didn’t. Instead she took him to his pediatrician and demanded to know why he could read but he couldn’t hold his own bottle.

Malik’s legendary intelligence was further cast aside in the third grade when his teacher in order to stop him from telling the whole class the lessons for the day that she wrote on the board, gave Malik a thick “puzzle packet” to fill out to keep him quiet. Later on, he found out it wasn’t a puzzle packet at all but an IQ test.

When the enthusiastic teacher called Stacey to tell her how high Malik scored, Stacey was unimpressed. As a matter of fact, when the teacher told Stacey that Malik had the ability to skip elementary and middle school all together and start high school early, Stacey shot that idea down so fast, she didn’t even tell Malik about until he was an adult. Ironically enough, he never once received praise from his mother. The only way he found out he was a damn child prodigy was when Stacey was in the kitchen on the phone with one of her girlfriend’s bragging.

“Yeah, Eve, they tellin me Leek can go to high school now, but I don’t wanna send him with all of the older kids, no one will talk to him. He’ll be miserable without any kids around his own age.”

Eve on the other end of the phone must’ve made mention of the fact that she would actually have to let other children into the house for Malik to have somebody to play with, it enraged Stacey.

“You know what Eve, fuck you for real. I ain’t fittin to let any of these bad ass kids from the neighborhood up in my house. Eatin up all my food. I can barely afford to keep this hungry hippo fed. Bamma can almost eat a whole cheesesteak by himself with his fat ass.”

Recalling that part of the memory made his stomach growl again, so Malik turned off at the next exit which had a rest stop. He chose this particular stop because it had more than just fast food. As much as he liked his Mickey D’s, he was longing for a home cooked meal. They may not have had much growing up, but he had to give Stacey credit where it was due. That woman could season up shit and make it scrumptious. This time Mailk just wanted some smothered pork chops, cabbage and biscuits. But first he needed to get a phone, so he parked his truck in front of the mini-mart, shut of the ignition, took a stack of gift cards out of the glove compartment and shoved them into the front pocket of his shorts before heading into the store. Careful to avoid the cameras, he purchased the last burner phone he would ever use to call his mother.