I'm a Sucker for"Hey! C'mere! Look at This!"

I was working my way (slowly, slowly) through a collection of Donald Barthelme's short pieces when I came across the following passage: I was crossing the street in the rain holding an umbrella. On the other side of the street an older woman was motioning to me. Come here, come here! I indicated that I didn't want to come there, wasn't interested, had other things to do. But she continued to make motions, to insist. Finally I went over to her. "Look down there," she said pointing to the gutter full of water, "there's a penny. Don't you want to pick it up?"

Now, the funny thing is, moments before I encountered that passage, my mind had been drifting a little bit. Where it had been drifting, unbeknownst to me at the time, was about half a page ahead, smack dab into that very as-yet-unread paragraph.

It's so odd when things work out that way. I'm sitting there thinking, "I've always been a sucker for people?strangers?who say to me, 'Hey! C'mere! Look at this!'" and the next thing I'm doing, I'm reading about someone else encountering the very same thing.

I can't say for sure how long it's been that I've been unwittingly drawn in by strangers telling me to look at things. A long time. The "flock of turtles" ruse always got me as a kid. So did "Hey, c'mere?I wanna ask you something." I'm amazed I got through my childhood without once being kidnapped and sodomized. Maybe that's why I haven't learned my lesson yet. And that in itself is interesting?the fact that I haven't learned my lesson?considering that it wasn't until I was in my early 20s before anyone ever called me over to look at something interesting.

It was a warm afternoon, as I remember it, shortly before I moved out of Minneapolis. The morning clouds were dissipating and the sky was turning blue again. I was wandering across a concrete bridge toward downtown. I forget where I was coming from, but I'm pretty sure I was headed toward Moby Dick's?a tavern I was fond of at the time. Most of the bridges in Minneapolis crossed over one of the many highways that curlicue around town, but this one, this one I was crossing, went over an actual river. Not a major river?not the mighty Mississippi or anything (that was on the other side of the city)?just a little one I'd never been aware of before.

There wasn't much traffic that day, which is probably why I even heard the little old man shouting, "Hey! You!" from the other side of the bridge.

I ignored him at first. I was on my way somewhere to do something. But when he said, "Hey! Come over here and look at this!" I stopped, checked for cars and, without considering why I was doing so, trotted over to him. I might've been on my way somewhere, but I wasn't really in that big of a hurry.

"I want you to see something," he said as I approached. "I wanna know if you see the same thing I do."

He was a small, disheveled man in a faded flannel shirt and a tattered blue windbreaker. There weren't all that many bums in Minneapolis, but he looked like one of the few. He was leaning over the side of the bridge, looking down, and when I came up beside him, he pointed toward the river bank.

"Does that look like a dead little boy to you?"

I squinted. The muddy riverbank, some 20 feet below where we stood, was littered with car tires, single tennis shoes, cinderblocks and fast-food refuse discarded by passing motorists?but no, so far as I could tell, small corpses.

"Where?" I asked, "I don't see anything."

"Down there," he said, pointing again. "Under that plastic."

Following the line from the end of his finger, I finally saw what he was talking about. There was, indeed, a blue tarp down there, held against the riverbank by a couple of cinderblocks. There were no arms or legs sticking out from beneath it, nothing that obvious?but if you used your imagination, if you tried really, really hard, sure, you could probably make out the outline of a child's body in the various folds and ripples of the plastic.

Still, it wasn't much to go on. You could probably, just as easily, make out the outline of a large horse, or a dune buggy, if someone told you that's what you were looking for.

"Whaddya think?" he asked. "You think that's what it is?"

I tried my damnedest, but I had to tell him, "Oh, I don't know...could be a lot of things down there. Maybe it is?but I don't know."

"Do you think we should call somebody?"

There was such eagerness in his voice that I began to get the sneaking suspicion that not only was there a child's body under that tarp, but that this old man was the one who'd put it there. I also began to think that if I didn't get out of there soon, he'd invite me down to the riverbank to take a closer look, "just to make sure."

"That might be an idea," I told him. "But I've really got to run now. If you wanted to give the police a call, y'know, to check it out, by all means do so. I think you should. Really."

I turned and continued the rest of the way across the bridge. A block later I took a glance over my shoulder, to see the old man standing there still, waiting for his next witness to come along.

Out of curiosity, I scanned the newspapers for the next couple of days, just to see if there had been any bodies found under any bridges anywhere in the city?and whether or not an old man in a blue coat had been arrested in connection with them. I didn't see anything, so I guess I'll never know for sure what was under that tarp.