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He Fell
The boy's head lolled, blood flowing from his nose and mouth and a gash on his scalp. It stained the front of his Temple sweatshirt.
Maggie wasn't yet thirty, no more than a few years older than him, but she still thought of him as a boy.
Wearing only a sweatshirt on a cold autumn evening smacked of the recklessness of youth. University-branded clothing reinforced
the impression.
"He fell," the boy's friend said. He was also a boy, but he wore a jacket and was not injured.
Maggie could smell alcohol, which she read as another indication of youth, though she conceded that assumption
was entirely irrational. She had enjoyed a fair bit of saki tonight. Not enough to be drunk, but enough that she
would have thought twice before getting behind the wheel. In anticipation of the saki and the hassle of parking,
they had taken a cab to dinner.
When the pair emerged onto the sidewalk, Maggie's first instinct had been to recoil. Rich had leapt forward, taking some
of the injured boy's weight.
It was because she was a woman, Maggie decided, and had grown up conscious that a significant percentage of the
population was larger and stronger than she. That there was already a perception that she was a victim, an easy target,
and that such perceptions could easily become reality. Nighttime was dangerous. Deserted parking lots, like the one
the two boys had lurched out of, were likewise dangerous. It made perfect sense to recoil from strangers in such a situation,
even without the blood and alcohol.
"He fell," the boy's friend had said, and the scene became less frightening and more comprehensible. She felt the beginnings of shame
. Her response was selfish; she ought to have made an effort to help a fellow human being.
Rich hadn't hesitated. He was the better person, in many ways. It was one of the things she loved about him.
He kept change and small bills in his pockets, which he freely dispensed to the homeless, whose eyes Maggie attempted to avoid
. And now he leapt to the aid of the injured boy. Their lives intersected only briefly, a fluke of chance, but Rich still saw an
opportunity to do good.
He knew first aid, opined about the dangers of head wounds and alcohol poisoning. Rich told her to hail a cab, despite
the friend's more-or-less coherent assurances that they were fine.
Rich sometimes took the role of White Knight too seriously. Maggie suspected he kept a mental tally sheet of his karmic deeds,
every time he yielded his seat to an elderly woman, every quarter dropped into an outstretched palm.
He was a bit of a control freak in that way: it wasn't enough to control a scene, he also wanted to control
the entire narrative, no matter how minor his involvement. It was one of the things she didn't love about him.
But she hailed a cab without hesitation.
Peppy Bollywood music spilled out of its windows. Rich helped steer the injured boy into the back seat.
The cabbie looked less than pleased, but didn't refuse the fare. While he wiped down the back seat later, perhaps
he would cast himself as the White Knight of the evening, and feel pleased for the part he had played.
Rich paid him, instructing him to go to Jefferson, over the friend's protests that the boy just needed to sleep it off.
The cabbie produced a rag, not terribly filthy, and Rich illustrated the application of direct pressure to the scalp wound.
It might be a concussion, Rich warned; best to get it checked out in the emergency room. And the gash would certainly
require stitches. The injured boy emitted a moan, but no more coherent sound. His friend seemed willing to accept Rich's advice,
if not entirely pleased by the prospect of spending the evening in the waiting room.
Maggie and Rich watched the taxi's taillights recede. She touched the lapel of his coat, damp with the boy's blood,
and regretted the decision. She wanted to wash her hand and consign the coat to the dry cleaner or the garbage:
basic hygiene combined with an almost superstitious aversion to a stranger's bodily fluids. But Rich smiled,
a White Knight accepting a token from his lady, and it was all right. They walked on, and when she stumbled he
made jokes about another trip to the emergency room. And so the events of the evening were woven into their lives,
a minor deviation from their daily routine.
It was not until she read the paper next day, and saw the story of a cabbie and passenger found stabbed to death in a taxi,
that it occurred to Maggie that they had neither witnessed the injured boy's fall nor heard him say how he had been hurt.
Because she was too selfish to be a White Knight, her first reaction was not one of horror or guilt, but rather relief
that she and Rich had not climbed into the taxi.
Megan Powell's short fiction has appeared in various magazines and anthologies, most recently Flashing in the Gutters,
Murder Across the Map, Short Attention Span Mysteries, and Shadows Mystery Magazine. My editing projects include
the webzine Shred of Evidence(www.shredofevidence.com) and the cross-genre anthology Crossings. Her novel, Waxing
was released in fall of 2005.
Megan Powell's Web Page
Email: Megan Powell
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