It was just after midnight on a drizzling, cold and miserable Friday night in Lewiston.
The call came in after a long period of silence over the police scanner. Somewhere on College Street, a boy of 11 or 12 had been spotted barefoot, coatless and weeping on a cold, wet sidewalk.
There was nothing frantic about this call. In Lewiston, it is a rare thing for an hour to go by without a report of a half-naked somebody acting strange in one corner of the city or another.
A cop who had been patrolling Bartlett Street radioed in that he was headed over to College to investigate the report of the weeping boy. Another officer advised that he was in the area and would head that way as well. After that, nothing. The sleepy hiss of silence fell once again over the airwaves.
At home, a steak sizzling on the grill, I began the increasingly common One-Boot Dance of the Terminally Undecided. As the name implies, I had one boot on and one arm waved into a coat sleeve when the indecision began.
Was I really going out for a report of a weeping 12-year-old? Chances were great, after all, that the boy was shoeless and blubbering over something utterly mundane.
Perhaps his Momma had caught him using his cellphone under the blankets when he was supposed to be sleeping. Or perhaps his Pa had ordered him to put that video game away and do your homework, young man, or no TV for you all weekend.
Kids throw tantrums for all sorts of reasons, and sometimes they storm out of the house without their shoes. Kids gotta be kids, yo. It was very likely that the weeping lad on College Street was pouting over something so prosaic, it would cause most adults to roll their eyes and expound at length about how when I was a boy, I had to walk 10 miles uphill both ways just to get to my bed, which I had to share with my 14 brothers and sisters because we were so poor, we could only afford one blanket.
So there was really no reason for me to put that other boot on and let the steak overcook, am I right? Let the police deal with the snotty, spoiled child and his sidewalk tantrum. I’m a journalist, sort of, not a baby-sitter.
But the maddening radio silence persisted and within that dull hum of nothing, alternative scenarios stir themselves into an uneasy froth.
What if the child had rushed into the street sobbing because he had just witnessed the murder of one parent at the hands of the other? What if the boy himself was the killer? What if both mom and pop had succumbed to a heroin nod and now were bluing on the living room sofa?
The boy might have escaped from a basement dungeon or he could be having a meltdown because Mom brought home Minecraft for the Xbox 360 when clearly he needed it for the Xbox One.
So many possibilities, so little time. And it’s not a new phenomenon.
Before I realized that “The One-Boot Dance of the Terminally Undecided” was a much cooler name for the affliction, I thought of this kind of scenario as “The Screaming Woman Imbroglio.”
Over police scanners everywhere, reports of screaming women come in all the time. Screams from downtown apartments, shrieks from dark alleys, chilling howls of agony from screamers of unknown origin.
I used to assume that every reported scream was a horrific murder in progress. I’d scramble out the door, often one-booted, and race toward the source of the hellish cries, only to learn that the woman in question was screaming because her boyfriend wouldn’t say, “I love you,” back. Or she had been unfriended on Facebook, had misplaced her phone, or had suffered one of a thousand other things that really don’t warrant screaming, yet people scream over them anyway.
Most of the time, the source of the screams is never found and we never get to know what prompted them. Was it something? Was it nothing?
Sometimes the facts turn out to be utterly dull. Other times, those facts just scurry off into the dark, refusing to be discerned. It goes down in the police reports as “unfounded” or “gone on arrival.” In the reporter’s notebook, it doesn’t get any mention at all.
And so it was with that 11- or 12-year-old weeping barefoot in the icy rain. I lingered over my boots so long while I pondered the mystery, I never got to College Street at all. Police searched the area, but they never found any boy, weeping or otherwise.
It nagged at me some, but what are you going to do? The kid was gone and my steak was venturing into well-done territory. I’m sure it was all just petty kid stuff, anyway, and that the boy is fine.
Just fine.
Probably.
Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. If you see him running up Pine Street in one boot, get out of the way. Email him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.
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