Closing the distance between us, I raised my hands and gestured for the boy to stop. He was thin, and breathing like a fire horse. He had pale skin, but black hair that looked like it had been cut in the time-honored bowl method with household shears, and his shirt and pants were too big.

“What’s wrong?” I said, dropping to my heels before him. “Is someone hurting you?”

The boy released a torrent of words, but all in what was, to the best of my knowledge, a Slavic language. We stared at each other in mutual frustrated incomprehension. Then he twisted away from me and pointed back in the direction he’d come.

A drainage ditch ran through this small, light-industrial neighborhood; I could hear its full-throated sound, working overtime after the heavy recent rains. Where it went under the street, a fence of three tubular rails lined the sidewalk, rib cage-high on an adult. Near it, on the sidewalk, were stiff forms of metal that resolved themselves, on a closer look, into bikes heeled over on their side. Two bikes. One kid.

The boy was right behind me as I ran over for a closer look. Just before the drainage ditch went under the street, it dropped a surprisingly good distance into a wider pool bounded by cement walls to prevent overflow onto the street in rains like the kind we’d been having. In drier weather, we’d probably have been looking down into some mud and marshy grass, through which ran a sedate creek. Not now. This early morning, the rains had created a catchpool that roiled irregularly, turbulently.

“Did somebody fall?” To illustrate, I made walking fingers with one hand toward the railing, rising slightly to illustrate climbing, and then I imitated a plunge down.

The kid nodded and said something I didn’t understand.

The newspaper driver had arrived behind us. “Call 911,” I said, swinging a leg over the railing. “Tell them a kid fell in. Take this boy with you and keep him calm.” I didn’t wait for her to acknowledge my request, climbing down to dangle from the lowest railing, with my feet swinging above the surface of the water.