Chapter 25: Ignorant Victims
“Ah good, you’re awake,” Kaitlyn said, pulling his attention back to her affirmed-angelic face, as she squatted by his side. “I had to remove your gear to check for internal injuries. You were unconscious, so I didn’t know how badly you were hurt. Sorry,” she said, feigning embarrassment. “I was looking for signs of internal bleeding, broken bones, that sort of thing. How do you feel?”
The guy blushed on hearing her say it was she who’d stripped him.
Still out of his line of sight, I gave Kaitlyn an encouraging smile and a double thumbs up to say, ‘Keep it up, shishya, you’re doing great!’
The guy started patting himself all over, stroking his flanks and down his legs, pressing on his belly, wincing at the last. “Dizzy, but okay, I think. Sore around the middle. My foot hurts.”
Kaitlyn moved down to his foot and gently wiggled it.
“The other one,” he said.
She reached over for the other foot and wrenched a gasp of pain from him as she started to rotate it. “It’s got to be sprained. We’re going to have to bind that up.” She began looking around, and I pointed her at the first aid kit she’d dropped on the ground, which had an Ace bandage in it. She carefully but firmly wrapped the ankle. As she finished she told him, “You don’t seem to have a head injury, or you’d still be down. How about you take that helmet off and let’s have a look anyway, though.”
The guy was young, early college age, 19 or 20 maybe. I was guessing he was here for Spring Break.
Kaitlyn crawled up by his side on the sand, knelt in a seiza pose, grabbed his face in her hands, and looked into his eyes, probably checking for dilated pupils. She held his head immobile while she ran her finger back and forth in front of his eyes, checking whether he could track the movement. I guessed she’d had first aid training as part of her college field work. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Danny,” he said, abstractedly. Shaking his head a bit, he clarified, “I’m Daniel Gomez.”
“Well, Danny, I’m Kaitlyn, and that’s my boyfriend Davie over there.” I walked back into his line of sight and waved. “We were out here hiking and biking when you flew past. We saw you crash,” she lied smoothly, “and we came running.”
“I think you’re going to be limping out of here,” I put in.
“I’ll be fine. I’m getting dressed,” he said baldly, all testosterone and young foolishness, not wanting to show weakness in front of another man, which is doubtless what had him tearing solo up an unfamiliar canyon in the first place.
“Hold on there, Danny, you were just in a motorcycle crash,” Kaitlyn interrupted, grabbing his attention back from me. “Danny, you need to stay sitting for a while until you get clear-headed. If you fall over, you’ll just hurt yourself again,” she said firmly. “Are you getting cold?” she asked him. We were near the North face of the canyon, so it was already shady here, despite being maybe an hour after noon.
Danny said, “Yes,” looked down again to begin zipping his jacket back up, and noticed his cut-up tee shirt. “What happened to my shirt?”
“Davie had to rip it open for me. I told you, we were looking for injuries.” He scowled at me, but she hooked his chin with a finger and returned his focus to her. “Danny, you could have died! We were scared. Your clothes weren’t our first priority!”
That got his attention. He just looked down sheepishly, then zipped the jacket halfway up. Then a bit more. He tried reaching for his pants but winced at the bruising in his core.
Kaitlyn reached past him, grabbed the riding pants for him, turned them inside out again, and handed them to him, saying, “I think you’re going to have a hard time getting those on.”
He went bulling forward anyway. He got his good leg into one side, then tried stuffing his wrapped foot in the other, got it stuck, and wrenched it good enough to pull tears from his eyes. Kaitlyn and I carefully pulled them back off.
We then retrieved one boot and sock where I’d tossed it earlier and clad his good foot.
He was re-dressed as well as we could manage under the circumstances, so I got under his weak-side shoulder and helped him limp over to Kaitlyn’s bike.
Danny was looking properly chastened by this point, with most of the bull-headedness knocked aside by pain and embarrassment. He unzipped a breast pocket and took out a smartphone. It took me a few seconds to realize why it had survived unscathed: the guy had broken the phone’s fall! Good on ya, guy, break your body to save the damn smartphone. I did not say this to him, obviously.
“No signal,” he complained dully.
“No surprise. These canyon walls are about the worst natural enemy of a cell signal, and we’re pretty far from town besides,” I offered.
Kaitlyn handed him the water bottle we’d been helping him tipple from and told him to drink the rest down. He’d bled a lot internally before I’d gotten to him, and although I’d been able to scoop a lot of it up and return it to his circulatory system, a fair bit of it was lost around his organs. He’d need to regenerate some of that.
As he stood there gently swaying, he said, “I saw an angel. I think I almost died.”
“I think you were damn lucky!” Kaitlyn barked, putting on a mother hen attitude she’d doubtless picked up as a child. “Did you see how far away from your bike you landed? Don’t you smell the gas? That bike is busted up good, and you’ll be limping out! You’re lucky to be alive!”
There’s something about women that lets them get away with that sort of scolding. It’s probably bone deep in our genetics, without which we’d have more juvenile deaths in the species. If I’d said that to him, especially in that way, he probably would have tried to hit me, but from her, he just dropped his head and said, “Yeah.” Then thoughtfully after a few seconds, “Shit. Sheeeyit.”
We left him standing there recovering and processing as Kaitlyn scooped up the remaining gear that he couldn’t put on, and I dragged over his busted dirt bike. Kaitlyn stuffed the boot, sock, knee pads, and first aid kit into one side pannier of her bike, by which time it was full, so she just draped his riding pants over the trunk bag, trusting in friction to keep them in place.
Kaitlyn got on the other side of the heavy and awkward dirt bike, and we told Danny to walk ahead of us, using Kaitlyn’s bike as a kind of walker so we could keep an eye on him.
As we approached my own bike, still where we’d moved it earlier today, Kaitlyn said to the guy, “We were standing here in this alcove looking at the scenery when you tore past us like a bat out of hell. Scared the pee-water out of us, it did!”
“Sorry,” he muttered with poor grace.
When we emerged from the canyon, Danny tried his smartphone again and this time got a signal. We waited while he called a friend back in town, told him what happened, and arranged for a third guy they knew to come by with a pickup truck to haul Danny and his motorbike back into town.
That settled, we sat down on a little shaded sand dune down-slope from the canyon mouth and talked with Danny while we waited for his friends to show up. His mind was clearing from the crash, so he eventually realized how lucky he’d been and finally thanked us. We gave him a companionable squeeze around the shoulders, him sitting between us.
As it turned out, he was indeed on Spring Break from the main USU campus up north, visiting friends down here. He took off without them this morning, another mistake which we didn’t have to scold him on: he got that one on his own.
When his friends drove up, they invited us to throw our trail bikes in the truck bed along with the broken motorbike, but we urged them to get him to a hospital to be checked out, and they agreed. We biked back to town separately.
We’d planned to eat lunch out in the canyon after merging ourselves with that patch of Gaia, but with the crash, the time needed to take care of Danny, and then ride back to town, it was about 2pm before we locked up our bikes next to a casual restaurant and tucked into a late lunch, ravenous.
We took our time, so about an hour later, Danny and his friends walked in on us, Danny rocking a new crutch and re-dressed in a loose set of cargo shorts and a new tee shirt.
We introduced ourselves all around, then Kaitlyn had a few quiet words with one of Danny’s friends, who proposed her plan to the group as his own: to overtly celebrate Danny’s lucky escape from the crash in order to cover our covert plan to keep an eye on him long enough to be sure there were no latent injuries. They didn’t need to know I’d already checked him out more thoroughly than a skilled radiologist could have using an MRI machine.
We had about as good a time as you can manage in rural Utah on a Sunday evening. The guys were a fun extroverted bunch, so we let them lead the party. They didn’t know how lucky Danny was. He might’ve survived those internal injuries if airlifted immediately to a hospital, but if we hadn’t been at hand, it’d have been a coin toss whether he died from internal bleeding or heat stroke first.
This was not the way I’d planned for this day to end, but it turned out to be transformative for me, crystallizing several loose concepts into a stronger unified whole: this was what the magic was for. I said as much to Kaitlyn after the college kids left. She agreed wholeheartedly.
The next day, Monday, I was out to lunch when I ran into Officer Poulsen again, getting his “breakfast,” his night schedule about 8 hours off of mine.
“You again,” I accused jokingly.
“Ah, good day, Mr. Bhat,” he greeted me much more formally, his good training outshining my militantly casual demeanor. “May I sit?” I waved him at a spare chair. He took it, then said, “I heard an interesting thing last night before getting off-shift. A tourist gentleman showed up at the hospital earlier that evening complaining of minor injuries from a motorcycle crash. He said a couple called Kaitlyn and Davie patched him up and helped him back to town. And you know exactly who I immediately thought of when I heard that second name.”
“Yes, that was me and my girlfriend,” I said sheepishly. “She deserves the main credit. She’s with the BLM, so her first aid is much more up to date than mine.”
“Camping again?” the officer queried.
“That’s right. We were mountain biking and hiking up the canyons when that kid came tearing past us and crashed up the canyon. It was scary. He got really lucky getting off as light as he did.”
“Well, you’re out there doing all kinds of good stuff, aren’t you, Mr. Bhat?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t plan on any of this. The trash, the crash, I’d prefer that I didn’t run into either,” I said.
His eyes narrowed at my omission of our first encounter, but he let it go.
Poulsen had grabbed his breakfast in a bag to eat it in his car, but I offered, “Why don’t you stay and eat here, Officer?”
He looked at me, head cocked a bit, then accepted. We traded stories about growing up, me in India, him in Moab, letting each other a little bit into our lives, him more reticent than I, and me plenty reserved.
We found it easier to talk about our work. He wasn’t much interested in computers, so I let him run on about police work. At some point, he made a connection, a trait that probably made him a good cop: “Hey, you’re a bicyclist. Maybe you could act as my sounding board on a case I’ve been nibbling at for months without success.”
“All right,” I agreed gamely.
“There’s a crew in town stealing high-end bikes, and there’s a lot to choose from around here, both mountain bikes and road bikes. The thing is, I’ve just not been able to figure out how they’re doing it or where the bikes are going. The bikes never show up again locally, and none has ever been recovered from…wherever it is they go.” He blew out a breath of frustration.
“It’s grand larceny, as expensive as these bikes are, even on the used market, but my lieutenant isn’t giving me much time to pursue it, so progress has been slow. They pretty much only give me time to work on it when the crew takes a rental, since that affects local businesspeople. If it’s a tourist’s own bike, we just type up a report, give them a copy, and tell them to call their insurance company. We’ll never see the bike or the tourist again. No point spending any time on chasing the theft.”
“I see your problem, Officer,” I empathized.
“The problem with bikes,” he continued, “is that they’re so mobile and easily concealed. You can ride one away at speed, then hide it in a shed until the search cools off. Then there’s another problem: if someone steals a car with a flashy paint job, it’s pretty easy to find it, but if someone steals a high-end bike with a flashy green and cyan paint job, there’s a hundred more out there. They’re all flashy!” he complained.
“Most of them, yes,” I agreed, “especially around here. Not too many anonymous back-alley rusty single-speeds with sun-rotted seats here in bike-rich Moab.”
“Hmpfh. Well, I can’t say it’s been enlightening, but it has been good to unload a bit. Thanks, Davie.” He got up.
“Good day, Officer Poulsen. Have a good shift tonight. Be safe.”
“You, too, Mr. Bhat.”