It was a red sunset, the sort that sent blurry beams of color glinting off of the windows of skyscrapers and mixing with the muddy city textures, like paint in dark water.

It's funny, I only remember little bits and pieces of my childhood. Snapshots laid out on a table. Some of them black and white, others in color.

This one's in color.

I was watching water run down towards the drains carrying the dregs of New York City, trying very hard to do tricks with a YoYo like I had seen Tom Jackson do. I don't know why I had been sitting on the step. It most likely had something to do with the fact that my mother was a firm believer in children my age getting enough fresh air.

Well, not many of my buddies were around, so I wasn't the happiest camper, sitting on that step with cigarette smoke blowing downwind from Mr. Kinney on the corner. Fresh air, all right.

Again, bits and pieces.

I know it had rained earlier. The leaves were drooping under the weight of the water, and the gutter gurgled as it contributed to the filthy river running by me.

Then, two things:

1) An old but well-cared for Ford Model T pulled up in front of the narrow brick house we shared with another family.

2) My YoYo slipped from my finger, skipped down the steps, splashed through the water, and toppled to a stop in the middle of the road.

My moment of distress was punctuated by a man getting out of the passenger side of the Ford. I don't remember seeing who was driving, but I distinctly recall the midnight-blue, swallow-tailed coat the man wore, because it seemed so jarringly formal on our block, and the large, black umbrella over his arm.

We weren't so strict on not talking to strangers. If a chap needed your help, you gave it.

"Boy," I believe he said, not unpleasantly, approaching me and stopping several paces from my step. I was in mid-action of getting up to retrieve my YoYo, but I sat down again at the sound of his modulated but slightly adenoidal voice. "Have you-by any chance-seen this man?"

And then he held up some sort of paper with a detailed drawing. Its subject was a thin and sinewy, in dark trousers, a knee-length trench or rain coat with a lot of buttons, and rather vague hair, as if the drawer wasn't particularly certain how he was wearing it.

It was his face that stood out to me, and still does. It was rather shadowed. Perhaps the artist had done that on purpose. Sharp edges that reminded me of a carved wooden sculpture conveyed an enigmatic, determined purpose, and consequently I remember wondering if he was a criminal or a fugitive.

I think I asked the man if he was police, and that he said he was, and when I didn't know who the man was, he thanked me anyway and gave me a nickel and walked back to his car with a long gait.

The most clear event that has stood the test of time is not the detective or policeman or whoever he was, but what happened after:

I jumped up, still holding my nickel, and quick-stepped over the damp pavement to fetch my YoYo. We were close to the corner, so I didn't see the automobile pulling onto our street at quite a speed until I was out in the middle of the road with my hand on the wooden toy. A deer in headlights, I froze, heart nearly beating out of my chest as it screeched towards me, the driver frantically going for the breaks, but then he came out of nowhere, maybe even out of the drawing I had just seen-a man in a buttoned coat who seized my arm and pulled me onto the curb.

He dusted me off, tipped his hat, and went on his way as if nothing at all had happened, hands in his pockets.

I gawked at him and the woman who had been driving was practically in pieces; she swerved to the side of the road and ran to make sure I was uninjured. Mr. Kinney came over, too, and soon my mother was out, a spoon covered in dough still in her hand, to see what all the commotion was about.

They asked me who it was. I said I didn't know.

I stared at the pieces of the YoYo in the street until patches of light pooled beneath the many windows of Ruby Street in the darkness.