There’s something about the freedom of a
motorcycle ride … the wind blowing through your hair,
passing mere cars at
light speed, mosquitoes splattered against your grin. I
guess that was why.
But why would ol’ Dingle let Dewey Decker take his
motorcycle out for a
spin?
“Hey, I was right there,” Dingle said later. “I
told him not to go past
the neighbor’s mailbox, and I’d shown him how to run the
thing. It’s not like
he wasn’t supervised.”
But Dewey?
The problem is, Dewey has … occurrences. A Dewey
Occurrence (and the capital letters
are on purpose here) normally consists of something so out
of the ordinary
happening to him that it would be virtually impossible to
happen to someone
else. Like the time he got his father’s pickup truck stuck
in the mud. During a
drought. In the only mud puddle in the county.
If Dewey drove a car in the Indianapolis 500, it
would be hit … by a
meteor. If Dewey took the podium to conduct the high
school band on the
football field at half time, the podium would disappear
into quicksand. If
Dewey had been a soldier in World War II, we’d all be
speaking German.
So
allowing Dewey to ride a
motorcycle … even as far as the neighbor’s mailbox … comes
perilously close to
being a crime against humanity.
You don’t really think of accidents happening at
less than five miles an
hour. Not usually. But I understand Dingle’s motorcycle
can be fixed, Dewey
only has to wear the cast for six weeks, and the neighbor
was tired of that
mailbox, anyway. The nurse down at the emergency room said
she calls them
“donorcycles.”
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Brought to you by The Fly
Fisherman’s Bucket List by Slim Randles, from Rio
Grande Books, and now
available at Amazon.com.