Victim Of A Crime

By Kurt Mullen

Originally Published on Bull

VICTIM OF A CRIME

He was inching his way across the bridge, this gray-skinned man dressed for business, when two punks ran by and took his briefcase. I wanted to call them goons but that would imply a kind of criminal professionalism. They were just punks, rogues, delinquents, in the middle of the 1970s, and on another day they were running around with their clothes off or selling fireworks to suburban kids, playing at being mobsters in the old Italian neighborhood. They were 10, 15 feet past the gray-skinned man, running away when one of them launched his briefcase up and over the rail of the bridge, over a channel of water so cold it would kill you. They never broke stride, it was like running the bases, so easy, and my brother and I could barely believe it. The briefcase flapped open and stayed open, like a mouth with tetanus, one that was coughing up hundreds of white papers over those gelid waters. I watched it from the back of my dad’s green Toyota, in traffic on the bridge, wipers going in the rain. Even as it whirled on toward its apex, the flying attaché, the purloined portmanteau, on past its own slow scatter of papers, my brother and I were saying, You see that? It was just the one brother for me, and I preferred laughing with him over the gift of his elbow in my face. Maybe we were like the punks, my brother and I laughing, and maybe the punks were like us, too young or too lucky so far to have been the victim of any crime. Not so the gray-skinned man, who was halfway across the bridge when accosted. The papers, the illusion of control, he was frozen to the iron walkway by these sudden losses. Can you imagine? You’re just trying to go to work, nudging your life along, and now what are you going to tell your clients? When the traffic began to crawl again he stayed standing still, a chance monument in our day of sightseeing here in the big city. This was in Boston, 200 years after men flung crates of tea into the same water under cover of a night. In feathers and beads and animal skins they ran off the ship, and how could they not be snickering, like the punks laughing over their shoulders as they ran away. Like my brother and I sniggering in the back of the station wagon as we turned off the bridge. Like me, alone, twisting in my seat for one last look, and still he had not moved.