Briefly Defying Gravity

I remember Dooley lying there in a heap. I was on the far end of my parents' Russian Olive, but I could see back through the draping foliage a moaning friend. Was he friend enough for me to go back and try to help him? My mind raced. I had, myself, just managed to escape almost certain capture by leaping from the fence to the ground below, then running to the end of the hedge for cover. Did I dare give up my position to go and check on my fallen comrade?
The danger was real. My little brother was chasing us, and I could hear him hollering and fiddling with the lock on the gate. Dooley was hardly moving. I had to make a choice. I ran. Straight to his side. He was holding his left arm at a scary angle, and it became immediately apparent what had happened: My relative age and experience had given my just enough coordination to make the jump, but my smaller, rounder counterpart had tumbled somehow and used his left arm to break his fall. The fall broke him. Behind me, I could hear the gate fly open and my little brother shout, "Aha!" He had us.
Then suddenly, it was all over. "What happened?" he said, looking down at Dooley.
"I think I broke my arm," hissed Dooley through gritted teeth.
I felt a little sick. "No you didn't. You'll be fine." I couldn't imagine how our game of "Run From Foo" had turned out so badly. The girl down the street, Doomsday, had broken her leg once but she was always on the edge of trouble anyway and that was bound to happen to her eventually. And that one wasn't my fault.
I was pretty sure that this broken arm probably was. It happened in my yard, running from my little brother, and Dooley had been hopping off the fence just like me. I might as well have beaten him with a baseball bat. That's when I noticed that my little brother was staring at me. He may not have been thinking, "What should we do now?" but that's what I felt. That's when I uttered the phrase I had heard in countless bad horror movies when the girl has fallen down and the monster is coming up fast: "Can you walk?"
The answer turned out to be "Yes, but it would have been much better to go get his mother than to drag him across the street holding his battered limb and fighting back tears." That's what I did anyway, and the fact that Dooley's mom was a nurse probably saved us from being in any specific trouble because her immediate concern was with the injury, not the cause. He was whisked away to the emergency room in their family station wagon, and we did not see him until the next day. The cast was substantial, and the sling made him just a little more pitiful.
There was no official blame placed for this accident, but I have carried it with me for all these years. For a few weeks, we were admonished by my parents not to climb on the fence since "we've already had one broken arm already." That stung, but not enough, after a few days, to keep from walking along that top rail, or scaling the inside rails to hop cleanly to the ground on the other side. The gate was a nuisance, since it would have to be re-latched and would almost certainly set the dog loose. Jumping the fence was a more practical solution, even when Foo wasn't chasing us. After that, Dooley stayed away. That was the only broken arm on that fence.