When Dewey Bustle found the shrivelled monkey finger, he just didn’t know what to think. He asked his buddy Fern, who was burly, with a perpetually scratchy jaw. The name Fern was short for Wakefern; he never liked being called Wake, it reminded him of death. Fern’s fondest dream was of finding an entirely new name, the perfect name, the name he would always have had if only his parents the Winkowskis had loved him more, the name written for him and him alone in God’s book above the sky. Just this past week, he had tried on for size both “Johnny” and “Ricardo,” posing with great panache in secret among the six foot willows along the river, where he went for his daily moment of privacy and defecation, but neither name carried the satisfactory combination of criminal grace and ecclesiastical aplomb. For the time being he was grumpily answering to Fern.
 
“What id it?” Dewey said.
 
“It’s fuckin’ gross, is what it is,”  Fern said. “Puke city. Throw the fuckin’ thing out.”
 
“Yeah,” Dewey nodded, but secretly he slipped the monkey finger into his pocket. He knew he would never part with it, even till the day he died. Dewey had a way of knowing such things, even without knowing that he knew them. If only he could have warned Fern that each of them was not alone in the sudden tangling of circumstance, that their blunt small lives were about to change together, forever; if only Fern had been able to listen to the wet whispers of the swamp breeze that ruffled their blankets under the highway bridge, perhaps in the end things could have been different. Perhaps not; it doesn’t matter, because Dewey couldn’t say any more, and Fern could only grumble. In Dewey’s ragged pocket, the monkey finger lay in lint and darkness, unchanging, a prune-colored twig with a knuckle and a black fingernail and a little tuft of hair.
 
Sometimes on still sunny mornings, Fern would fall into a joking mood, when his face would keep it’s perpetual concrete scowl but his words would drop from those hard lips like crystals from a chandelier, straight down with a clear ringing that would wrench from Dewey irresistibly an explosion of wet-eyed giggles like a tickled child. Sitting in the moist shade under the bridge, slicing a stick of scavenged pepperoni with the delicate flourish of a gourmand, and laying the aromatic discs on Wonder bread, unembellished, Fern would offer the first to Dewey, stretching out his big blunt hand and saying in his grumpy way, “Want a donkey dick sandwich?”  At first, Dewey would hunch and grin and let out his sudden unquenchable joy in tiny explosive gurgles, one by one, between bites. Then he’d tremble to calm, and they would chew and Fern would ramble about all the things he knew, which were many and minute and meaningless to all the rest of the wide world; he’d talk about the aesthetic properties of rust, and about the size of interstellar dust grains, and about the Nepalese hermit who domesticated a Yeti in order to have an occasional dinner guest, and about how Halley of comet fame preached religiously that inside the Earth were other Earths the size of Mars, Venus, and Mercury, all hiding cozily inside one another like Chinese boxes. Fern believed fervently in other realities, and he was immensely, but secretly, grateful for his rapt congregation of one.
 
Then, handing another folded clump of bread and pepperoni to Dewey, he’d say, “Want a pony penis sandwich?” Dewey would wilt. He’d crumple. He’d implode like an old building. He’d gasp in a high whine, then spray wet morsels of chewed sandwich from his lips like a sneeze. His breath would catch and burst, catch and burst, his stomach clenching, and tears would fill his eyes. His howl would echo like a bell in the steel beams beneath the bridge. He’d scare himself with ecstasy. In all his life, he had never been happier.
 
All that spring and summer, until the day that Dewey found the severed finger lying like a sacred offering alone and bloodless on a bed of soft grass at the edge of the river, their life together under the bridge had been good. It had been good as things are measured by the small and the lost, when all the sky’s hard and glittery stars have conspired in wicked glee to rob them of every little thing, of every last common and ordinary thing that those more fortunate toss about with never a thought as they construct their matchbox edifices of temporal happiness. Dewey, even had he tried, could never have formed the mental image of himself as the helpless pawn of a vast, malevolent universe; when Fern attempted it, as he often did when he took time alone to escape the tender burden of Dewey’s love and silence, the picture was all a cloud, a gray and shifting fog that refused to form a recognizable shape in his mind.
 
For Dewey, those moments with Fern were reminders of the long ago day with his father when they huddled under the roots of a fallen pine during a blizzard, outlaws in a hideout scraping up a crafty smokeless fire, wisecracking till the white fury died, the one and only moment in his childhood when he’d felt reasonably sure that the next second he wouldn’t get the back of a hand hard across his face.
 
Under the bridge, Dewey and Fern were winning in tiny mosquito victories their war against the malicious lumbering beast that is the mindless whim of God. Until that day.
 
They sat silent as the late sun snuck its marigold light like a burglar into the cool shade under the sloping blue steel. Fern said, “Think about this one, man: somewhere there’s a chimp with only four fingers on his hand.”
 
Dewey nodded once. He didn’t look up from the circle he was drawing in the dirt with a stick.
 
“My uncle Bo was like that.”  Fern held up his index finger bent at the knuckle. “Chopped it off doing a guillotine on a chicken. Felt fuckin’ weird to shake his hand.”
 
Dewey stopped drawing the circle. He clasped his left hand over his right to hold it back from digging into the pocket where the monkey finger hid.
 
“Who would chop a finger off a monkey?”  Fern said. “That’s like mutilating your kid brother. Shit.”
 
Some might say that dooms are interchangeable. In the end, the details don’t matter. In an invisible landscape, a desolate road stretches out ahead, and just around a distant bend, a black-clad figure approaches.
 
Sometimes there are detours that prolong the journey, forks in the road that twist like labyrinths before, inevitably, returning to the course. And maybe it’s the traveler’s own everyday decisions that conjure or conceal those delaying detours--the decisions to hide or to disclose, to fear or to love. Maybe, but no one knows.
 
Dewey Bustle was seven years old when his mother was killed by a windblown street sign. It was during one of the late-winter gales that would sweep the riverfront in the old city, blasting tired brick and flesh alike with shards of ice like ground glass, stinging to tears the eyes of anyone foolish enough to be out. Dewey and his mother, who was hunchbacked from an old hit-and-run and had slowly collapsed in upon herself until she was mere inches taller than he was (and were it not for the sudden shocking glance of weary eyes buried in wrinkles, would appear to passersby to be his sister), were clutching at their flapping scarves and leaning bare-headed into the wind, struggling their way hand in hand toward the post office.
 
Dewey said, “Wait, mama,” and stopped. The words were torn from his lips as if he’d never said them, and his mother took another step to the end of the tether of his short arm, then turned with a sudden wild-eyed scowl. Dewey flinched.
 
That was when it happened, when the odd tangent of chance bisected some invisible parabola in the geometry of providence. It happened as Dewey scrunched shut his ice-stung eyes. He never knew why he stopped. He never thought about the crazy jerking dance in his peripheral vision of the red Yield sign held to its pole by one tiny screw, or about the thump and howl of gusts so strong that day that they ripped roofs off houses and knocked down oaks. He never knew if he was flinching because of the sudden loud metallic rattle that boomed like vaudeville thunder or because of her frown and the imminent violence of words poised at her lips.
 
While his eyes clenched tight like little fists, the Yield sign let go and blew. It flew like a knife flung in a circus, a hundred miles an hour, but with a sickening swoop in its spin that stopped short when it imbedded itself six inches into the side of her skull. Dewey never remembered what happened next. In the dim hallways of his memory, there was always that corner where the shadows were just too deep to penetrate, and being generally a quiet and content child (who grew into a placid young man with a faint droop in his eyelids and a slight hunch in his narrow shoulders and a perpetually bemused expression softening his lips), he saved the energy it might take to peer through the darkness for other, more mundane and realistic pursuits, like eating. He didn’t think even once about how the shadowy corner in his memory hid a railroad switch that sent his life careening down a track that would have been unimaginable mere seconds before the murderous red triangle of sheet steel bucked and flew. Later, he had only the foggiest realization that if he hadn’t stopped walking that day, hadn’t simply known what he knew in the cells of his flesh and blindly heeded the impulse, his head would have been precisely where his mother’s was, standing ready to receive.
 
But all that was far behind. Under the bridge with Fern, Dewey felt happy. He didn’t have to speak much; there were no explanations required. The morning sun turned the willows to dancing green flame. At dusk, waterbirds called in voices more of liquid than of flesh. The stars were like salt spilled all over the big black sky. Always, the river smelled like green mud and olives. And best of all, Fern took care of all the talking, as though it were a household chore and Fern was such a good friend he was glad to do all of Dewey’s work for him. Dewey guessed this was just about perfect, but then again:  things never last. That was a truth that Dewey knew that he knew, because Fern had said so. Dewey was positive that Fern would never lie.
 
But now, in the dark of his deepest pocket, Dewey kept a secret.
 
 
© Brent Robison, 2016