a preacher don't steal - 1. yancey

by nick nelson

part one of 32

yancey was a regular guy. mona was a saint. yancey and mona had a dog and a cat. they lived with yancey’s parole officer, the parole officer’s name was oliver. yancey had issues, or maybe they could be called dreams. mona had a dream. nikki was the parole officer’s daughter. william was nikki’s stalker. zorina was a panhandler, nikki’s oldest friend. william wanted to make zorina his ally in stalking nikki. he told her if he ever won the lottery he would split it with her fifty fifty. somehow zorina was not impressed. she told william he was a creep. but as william had been called a creep many times by hundreds of people, the deadly insult rolled off him. sometimes yancey took pity on william and tried to bond with him. yancey would take the dog, manfred, for a walk and invite william to accompany them. yancey would try to explain life and time and the universe to william as they walked along but william found these concepts too abstract and paid little attention to yancey. william was more interested in manfred, the dog, and in yancey’s relation to manfred, than in any high sounding platitudes about human rights and the fate of the earth and the expansion of the universe, such as yancey was prone to expound on. william was particularly fascinated by the fact that yancey would pick manfred’s turds up in little plastic bags. “fucking hitler or elvis presley or princess diana never had anybody pick their fucking turds up for them, but this fucking dog does,” william would exclaim incredulously. yancey would point out that there were millions of dogs like manfred who received the same service from their “owners” or “pet parents”. william could not comprehend numbers higher than three so this argument was wasted on him. but he never failed to get a good laugh out of yancey’s use of the term “pet parent”. on his part manfred was well aware of william’s hostility to him, but as he was not aware of anything he could do about it, he held his own council. manfred was also aware of yancey’s secret aspirations to start a new religion, or to reconfigure one of the existing ones in his own fashion, and he sympathized wholeheartedly with these aspirations. yancey could have saved the world, but he was afraid people would laugh at him. you can do it, yancey, manfred cried, but all the humans heard was manfred barking.