Monkey's-Paw Patterson's Final Wish

 

I wish it weren't so dark in there-- no, wait!

Nope, nope, nope, thought Matthew "Matty-Patty" Patterson. I'm not falling for that, again. He frowned at his lucky monkey's paw - now 90 percent disintegrated - and dropped it into his ratty overcoat pocket. I'll take my chances with this dank old tunnel. "Not yet, paw..."

In December of 1934, after four years of unemployed, train-hopping hopelessness and near-starvation, Monkey's-Paw Patterson had only one wish remaining on his monkey paw. He had been about to waste his fifth and final* monkey paw wish in order to illuminate the interior of the Catoctin tunnel - which, if we're being honest (which we ARE), isn't long enough to require interior illumination - when he remembered the old fortune teller's admonition from three years prior. The rules were literally set in stone (somewhere): Thou shalt not wish for additional wishes, and thou shalt be wary of that for which thou wishes (wisheth?).

Monkey's-Paw Patterson's hobo-ing companion, Hell's Own Breath Hinkley stopped momentarily. "What?" he asked.

 "What what?" Patterson replied, hoping that he wasn't about to embark on an infinite feedback loop of "whats."

"Thought you said something - 'Not yet, pa?' Something like that?"

"Oh - yeah," Patterson laughed. "Sorry. Just thinking out loud again, I suppose. Almost used my monkey's paw to light up this tunnel, but I only got one wish left, and I ain't wasting it on that."

Hell's Own Breath Hinkley nodded in the semi-darkness. "Smart. Say - that thing ever really work?" He heard the sad sound of Matty Patterson's bum left foot as it dragged, zombie-style, across the railroad ties, occasionally sending a piece of ballast gravel skittering ahead of them - and he cringed.

"Well, yes and no, pal. It kind of works, but there's always some awful gotcha. First thing I did when I got it was wish for my parents to not be dead. They died of infected pigeon scratches, in the bird war..."

"No kidding? That's terrible," Hinkley said, laying a hand on his friend's shoulder.

Patterson continued. "Yeah, and I just wanted to say goodbye and tell 'em I loved 'em. So I took the paw to their grave and made my wish, and sure enough, the ground shook and split open and out they popped. They weren't dead - but they weren't really alive, either. They growled and lunged at me, and bit me on my foot as I struggled with them. I barely got away in one piece. My poor foot ain't been the same since."

"That's horrible," Hinkley said, inadvertently launching an invisible cloud of hell's own breath in the direction of Patterson.

Monkey's-Paw Matthew gagged. "Oh, God - Hinkley! You're killing me!"

"Sorry."

"Anyway," he coughed, "My second wish was so simple, I thought it was a sure bet. I was hung-over something awful, after a night of drinking hobo wine, and I had the kind of headache that makes you think dying might be better. I wished for that headache to go away, and POOF! Gone in an instant."

"...And?" prodded Hinkley, remembering to cup his hand in front of his mouth. "What was the catch?"

"My guts pretty much exploded out my backside - right then and there, and for the rest of the morning. I would have had to rally just to die."

"Good Lord!"

"Damn right," Monkey's-Paw growled. "So, my third wish was wished in the heat of the moment. Ol' Barb Stab-You-Quick was fixin' to stab me - quick - so I wished for her to, you know, not stab me."

"That musta turned out okay," Hinkley said. "I mean, you're still here, ain't ya?"

"Oh sure, pal. She didn't stab me, no siree. She hit me with a hammer, instead. I think she probably fractured my skull. Took a half-dozen other 'boes to get her off me."

"You sure have had it rough, my friend. It's hard enough being a hobo, these days. Maybe you should throw that paw away. Sounds like it's more curse than blessing."

Patterson sighed heavily. "I might, I might. The fourth one was insulting. I'm telling you - it was just plain mean."

"What was wish number four?"

"Well - you know about my bum foot, right - on account of my undead old man biting me?"

"Yeah..."

"Well, that's not the foot that got bit. He bit my right foot. That was the gimpy one. So, I wished for it to go back to normal, and boy, did it ever! And just as quick - the left one went bad. It might even be worse than the right one had been. So, yeah. I gotta be real careful with this last wish..."

"You're a little slow on the uptake, ain't ya?" Hell's Own Breath Hinkley said absently. 

"Watch it, bub."

"Oh don't get sore with me - it's almost Christmas. And besides, you really should've learned your lesson by the second wish. So, what are you thinking for number five?"

"I don't think I'm supposed to tell anyone," Patterson semi-lied, having not been given that specific instruction. "Come on - it's getting dark. We better get camped, and get a fire lit..."

Late that night, with Hell's Own Breath Hinkley snoring stinkily away by the fire, Matthew Patterson stepped quietly to the edge of the firelight, removed the decomposing monkey's paw from his coat pocket, rubbed it gently, and began to wish. I'm begging you, paw - please make this Depression better. I want to work. I want a roof over my head. I want to see a doctor when I need one. I want to eat real food. I want everyone else to have these things. Please, please, please fix our broken country. I don't need the twenties back - the twenties weren't great for regular folk like me, anyway - I just wish we could all get well, okay? Not great. We'll take care of great. Just... fixed. Please?

A few days later, trudging through Hagerstown, Maryland, Monkey's-Paw Patterson saw a discarded newspaper. Its top two headlines: "America's Recovery Making Steady Progress Under 'New Deal,' and "Nazi Party's Swift Rise Alarms European Leaders."

"Well, hell," Patterson muttered. "I tried."

 

*We are well aware of the fact that W.W. Jacobs said the monkey's paw would grant three wishes, but we think that's dumb, on account of monkeys having FIVE digits, and the number of wishes corresponds to the digits and that's that. End of discussion.

Rubbery Dmitry, the Mad Monk Holds Steady

Black Lightning Strikes The Trees - Photo by J. Scott, 1996

His life was preordained to be one of privilege, wealth, and luxury. He was conceived on March 2nd, 1918 in St. Petersburg, during a riot on the first anniversary of Tsar Nicholas II's abdication. Of course, not everything that's preordained actually comes to pass, and before he was born, Dmitry Kalashnik's parents had lost everything that they couldn't fit into two suitcases, fled the Russian revolution in the dead of night, and washed up on Ellis Island. He was born on Christmas Eve - over two weeks late, and "very large."

Things went a bit downhill, from there. Just before little Dmitry's fourth birthday, his father, whose only marketable skill had been investing and counting money, succumbed to being run over by a streetcar (as so many future hoboes' fathers were). His mother, who hadn't known a minute of work of any kind, back home, stretched her late husband's meager life insurance as far as it would go, but after two years, it was gone. She could bake, and her pirogi were the talk of their neighborhood, so she was able to find work in a bakery, and she followed the shop's owner when he relocated to Pittsburgh in 1928. She married him not long after that, and for her, life began to resemble life, again.

We all know what happened next. The global economy melted into the fire and burned into a stinky smoke, Dmitry's mother and step-father lost their home and moved into a tiny apartment, and focused all of their energy on keeping their sweets and pirogi shop alive. The boy rebounded for a while, but finally left home in 1930, barely eleven years old, and survived as best he could the competing ravages of homelessness and puberty. 

While he learned to live outside, eventually becoming a full-fledged hobo, albeit a terribly young one, his mother learned to live without him, relying on her faith to paint a mental picture of him that wasn't crushingly tragic. In St. Petersburg, she and her first husband had been among the last of the Russian Orthodox Buddhists, and she had spent Dmitry's formative years working to instill in him the values of the great teacher. As she absorbed the sermons of her new husband's American Catholic priests in Pittsburgh, she prayed that she had set her son upon a decent path.

A lifetime later (10 years), having rebounded a dozen times from a dozen different horrors that would have sent lesser men to their whimpering deaths, Rubbery Dmitry, The Mad Monk held steady. He had next to nothing of his own, and that suited him fine. His life was simple. He was walking and riding the rails of freedom and migrant labor, and he was relatively content. He remembered neither the scripture, nor the teachings of Buddha - save for the lessons of stillness, from the latter. "Be still," he heard his mother whisper, "be still."

Life screamed at him to run, or to fight, or to run, fighting into the abyss of the horrible nothing, but he forced himself, shaking, to be as motionless as possible. He mentally reread the headlines of the day - Jews being rounded up and sent to camps, where there were reports of mass slaughter. War machines. Troops here, talks there, fleets, riots, death tolls, more talks, rumors, smoke, blood... 

He practiced his Buddhist breathing. He realized that he hadn't paid nearly enough attention to the lessons on breathing. He shrugged and tried to fake it until he made it, and he breathed all wrong. The world had gone mad, and it was all over essentially nothing, and the opposing forces were sworn to keep fighting until well beyond death, because the other side was so deeply, ungodly WRONG, and that, as they say, was that. 

Rubbery Dmitry, The Mad Monk closed his eyes. He thought. You might say he prayed. You'd be wrong, but forgiven for saying that. He heard his mother again - be still. He snorted, for although he knew exactly what it meant to be still, he had yet to master - or even honestly attempt - the art of being still. 

He took a deep breath, told all of his personal woes - as well as those of the universe around him - to give him a minute, and searched for stillness.

And it stopped. All of it.

And he heard his mother say, "Good, good. Steady... Now what?"