Cold Was The Ground

by B A Black

“Where are all the taxis?” he laments, as they struggle toward the nearest shelter—Houston’s apartment. There’s no question of continuing on in this weather.

  “If they’re smart,” Sal says, tight and quiet, “at home in bed. Christ.”

  Houston nearly passes his building, but when he realizes he’s home his heart breaks a little in relief. It’s not much, the inside, but they’ll be out of the cold and snow.

  He slips up the stairs and almost spills back down them in his rush to be inside, only Sal’s steadying hand between his shoulder blades catching him.

  “Watch it,” Houston warns belatedly as Sal puts him back up on his feet. “The steps ice up.”

  “Oh really?” Sal asks, his voice dark with irony.

  Inside, the foyer is a slushy, sloppy mess again. Houston doesn’t even have the energy to kick the snow off his shoes this time.

  Upstairs, Sal picks up Houston’s soggy paper off his doormat, and displays the running cover story for him, his fingers taking and leaving gray smudges. “Here’s where all the taxi’s are.”

  “Grand Yule Ball at the Colosseum”, the headline drips. Houston groans. He’d forgotten.

  “I can’t believe they’re still gonna do that this year,” Houston says. “Guys are starving to death in the street, if they aren’t freezing.”

  Sal drops the wreckage of the paper into the trash. “The show must go on. Let’s hope our missing millionaire has the good sense to stay inside, out of the cold tonight.”

  The offhand comment wakes a sharp worry in Houston. He hates to think of anyone out there on a night like this. “You think we’ll find him alive?”

  Sal sneezes once, explosively, dismissively. He peels off his coat, his wet shoes and socks, and lays them on the radiator. “Guys like that are pretty tough. Resilient.”

  “Like what?” Houston asks.

  “Thrill seekers,” Sal says. He’d know. “Turn on the heat, will ya?”

  Houston, half out of his own shoes, leans over to twist the knob and let hot water into his radiator. He sets his own socks out, pulling yesterday’s—now dry and stiff—off.

  “You believe all that stuff Phillips said?” he asks.

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Just seems out of line with what the wife said.”

  “What reason has he got to lie?”

  “He’s gotta lie every day,” Houston says. “Just to stay alive.”

  Sal turns a sharp, assessing look on Houston, leaning back as they both sit barefoot on the floor on opposite sides of the radiator, waiting for the thin heat to reach out into the air around them.

  “What do you lie about, Mars?” Sal asks in an undertone.

  Houston gets up off the floor, and goes to get into some dry clothes.

  “Some days, Sal,” he calls, knowing the question needs an answer. “I lie about everything.”

  ◆◆◆

  Dinner is soup, pulled down from Houston’s cupboard and cooked in the sharp, sour smell of gas from his stove until it boils. It’s all he can manage, aside from a percolator of coffee and some slices of toast to go with it.

  “Didn’t we just get paid?” Sal asks, looking into Houston’s nearly empty ice box in dismay.

  “Yeah,” Houston admits. “I haven’t had time to go shopping yet.”

  “How do you live?” There’s no meanness in the question.

  Houston pours his share of soup and passes some toast. “Honestly? There’s a diner up the street. 24 hours. You can get breakfast for a dime. I eat a lot of breakfast.”

  Sal chuckles. He’s got very little space to judge. “Breakfast wouldn’t be so bad right now.”

  Houston agrees, but it would mean going back out there.

  “Mars,” Sal starts seriously, and then seems to waver. “You mind if we sit on your sofa? My back’s killing me.”

  Sal looks strangely vulnerable, out of place in his borrowed pajamas; his clothes are soaking in the bathtub, hoping to ease out the last two days of “fine living”. In the kitchen light, his blue eyes seem almost black, his hair wet and free of brylcreem for once.

  Houston isn’t used to seeing him with his guard so far down. He only remembers to answer belatedly.

  “Yeah,” Houston says. “Of course—”

  A dull thud breaks the tension Houston feels, coming from the kitchen window behind Sal. Both men startle, turning toward the window.

  “There’s a cat out there,” Sal observes, shaking hot soup off his hand.

  “Yeah,” Houston says. “He wants in.”

  Sal shakes his head and goes to sit on the couch while Houston pries the cold, sticking window open enough to admit the inky black creature with intent yellow eyes. The cat drops to the kitchen floor, shaking snow out of each paw disdainfully and licking the dropped soup up before looking up at Houston. A mouth, pink and full of sharp teeth resolves itself out of the inky shadows of its face, and a demanding meow emerges.

  Houston closes the window. He passes the cat a bowl of kibble, and the cat sits in front of it, looking first down, then up at Houston again expectantly. Another meow.

  “There was tuna yesterday, pal,” he says. “You missed it. Them’s the breaks.”

  He leaves the cat and joins Sal on the couch, intent on eating his own dinner while it’s still hot.

  “I didn’t know you had a pet,” Sal observes.

  “He’s not mine.”

  “He’s in your apartment.”.

  “Sure,” Houston says, expecting an argument. “So are you.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Cat.”

  Sal looks at him over the rim of his cup, bright eyed, amused. “You’ll admit you’re soft someday, Mars.”

  “You can write it on my tombstone, Sal,” Houston says, gruffly.

  “Alright,” Sal says, leaving off. “What if you called him Chop Suey?”

  Houston gives him a long look. “That’s a bad pun.”

  “You never know what’s in Chinese food,” Sal says, mildly. “And it doesn’t imply any affection.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  The cat—newly christened after fried leftovers—appears as if summoned.

  “Hey, Chop Suey,” Sal calls. The cat trills an answer on an ascending scale, and crosses the living space with his tail up to investigate Sal’s offered hand. “See? He likes it.”

  Houston shakes his head, but he doesn’t argue. He’s had enough disagreeing with Sal for one day, and he remembers how quickly his partner was at his side in Phillips’ cottage. For all his protests, he didn’t let Houston fall into a trap he’d almost predicted.

  Houston’s fairly sure—but not positive—that he’s never met Phillips before. He’s careful, they run in different circles. But ten years ago—just after the war when Houston returned home, young and scared and missing an emotional limb—things were different. He was careless, egged on at the time by Lucas—the old flame, burning him up, tungsten-bright.

  “You alright, Mars?” Sal calls him back from that dangerous path. He is entertaining the cat in his lap, curled and comfortable and purring audibly even to Houston.

  It’s a sweet-sad picture, an echo that makes Houston’s heart ache. It’s the specter of the normality that by catering to his inversion, Houston has given up forever. The chance to come home to something steady and comfortable.

  “Yeah,” he says belatedly. “I’m okay. Just thinking.”

  “Yeah?” Sal yawns. “Was it about going to bed?”

  “About Charles Winsome. About his wife.”

  Sal’s got nothing to say to that. Houston helps him unfold the couch, giving him an extra blanket and pillows, before he starts to get into bed himself, just a few feet away in the open space of his apartment.

  “Will your back be okay?” he asks Sal.

  “I’ll tell you in the morning.”

  Houston gets the light, noting that the cat chooses to curl up next to Sal rather than in his usual place on the bed. He gets in u
nder the covers, mind drifting to a similar night almost a year ago.

  He and Sal, tumbling in the door roaring drunk and high on the desperate throes of life and soul-deep jazz that pulled the hardness out of their cores and into their limbs and extremities, leaving them holding on tight to each other; gasping for privacy, groaning into it, into each other’s mouths and then—

  “Hobbes?” Sal’s voice, careful in the deep dark of the night, reaching from his island of isolation to Houston’s. It snaps Houston’s awareness back from the warm, fuzzy edge of sleep.

  “Yeah?” he reaches back.

  “Thanks. For coming and getting me this morning, I mean.”

  “It’s alright, Sal. Get some sleep.”

  ◆◆◆

  In the morning the snow has returned purity to Chicago’s streets again, making the world seem heavier, like the weight of the glittering snow could force everything dirty and bad and wrong about the city down, closer to Hell.

  The new snow gives the world a pristine white coat. It won’t be long before the old stains show through and new stains spread across the surface. Houston can only see a small strip of the world below from his kitchen window, through the bars of the fire escape.

  The sun’s come out for the first time this week, pulling the shroud of clouds back like a caul from a grinning baby, touching a thousand brilliant points of light through the snow. Individual flakes that may shine brightly once before they disappear forever.

  Houston lets Sal and the cat sleep. He only managed a few hours, even after his long night. He wrings out Sal’s clothes and puts them on the horse, taking a shower before the boiler is overwhelmed for the day.

  Hunger makes a hollow in his belly and nests down like an animal, and Houston does his best to appease it with the cold, strong remains of coffee from the night before.

  His thoughts wake up more slowly than he does, and Houston considers the events of the coming day. They have a lot of leads. Houston wants a better picture of Charles Winsome; the best way to understand where he might be is to step back and see the picture between the extremes painted by Mrs. Winsome and Edward Phillips.

  The cat precedes Sal into Houston’s awareness—a little black shadow moving with enthusiastic grace across the tile, pouring on the charm at Houston’s ankles now that it’s time for food.

  By contrast, Sal creeps stiffly into the kitchen with one hand braced against his back and a storm-cloud expression that doesn’t suit the clear skies. Houston fills the cat bowl, and brings Sal the Nyalgesic from the bathroom cabinet.

  “Thanks, Mars,” he says, foregoing the offered cotton ball to pour the solution on his fingers directly instead. He reaches beneath his shirt to rub it over the wicked red scar. It is a long, knotted line of flesh, extending out from the dip of his spine at a right angle.

  It isn’t the first time Houston’s got a glimpse of it. He likes it less each time, knowing how much it troubles Sal, the lengths he goes to to ease the ache of it.

  “Any coffee left?” Sal asks hopefully, fingers working beneath his lifted shirt. His eyes are trained on the percolator. Intent.

  “I’ll make a fresh pot.”

  “You’re a prince. What’s today look like?”

  “Gotta run down those leads from yesterday, and one other. There’s a club he goes to—apparently to keep up appearances.”

  “Which club?”

  “The Two-Two-Six.”

  “Hell,” Sal puts the top back on the Nyalgesic, though it does little to stem the strong smell of menthol. “That’s one of Al Capone’s places.”

  “You think that’s relevant?”

  “I think it’s dangerous to mix with Capone on a good day. Mix in a secret like Charles Winsome’s and… well, Capone has a bad history with Valentines.”

  “We’d better go look, then. Get it out of the way. If it’s connected there, it’s not connected to the rest.”

  Sal snorts. “It’s connected to the rest. Easy to come down with a bad case of bullets in your lungs when the Mafia thinks you might be bad for their image.”

  Houston doesn’t have to ask what he means. The Mafia has their own laws—and harsh punishments for breaking them.

  “I’ll go in at the 226,” Sal says.

  Houston pours him a cup of coffee, wanting to protest.

  “I got a cousin,” Sal says, and then corrects himself. “A few cousins, and I won’t get offended.”

  Houston doesn’t argue. He knows if the case goes past the mob—and he senses it will—he’ll be the one on point in the Sappho and the Imperial. Maybe the Alhambra—if that place is still running.

  “Makes sense if he told his wife he was going up to the lake and never got there, that there’s a third party involved,” Sal observes, settling in at the kitchen table with his mug of coffee. “But I hope it ain’t the mob.”

  Houston gets up, retrieving his coat.

  “Where you going?”

  “Get dressed. We’d better start moving on this,” Houston says. “A week’s too long. I want news before we get a corpse.”

  ◆◆◆

  Houston watches the dark windows and striped awning of the 226 Club, waiting for his partner to emerge. The blanket of snow doesn’t seem to have changed the facade of the place.

  Grime still clings to the green and tan facade, and the walkway and sidewalk have been scraped clear in anticipation of an afternoon rush. Houston stands on the corner of Adams and Wabash, wondering who the limousine in front of the club belongs to. Is Capone in residence presently? Houston puts his hands deeper into his coat pockets, anxious. Sal’s family are primarily clean, hard working immigrants, but as a Brooklyn-born Italian, there is no avoiding all connections. He’d grown up in a Mafia neighborhood, some of his brothers had gone in or married in. It doesn’t help that every time he gets into financial trouble he calls his brothers and doesn’t ask too many questions where the money comes from. It’s a sore spot with Sal’s pride when he needs to.

  Houston smokes his second Chesterfield in two weeks, already raiding the pack he bought before Sal went into the club. It reaches in and soothes his nerves. Forty-five minutes pass, and the beat officer patrolling the block is giving Houston the eye when Sal finally emerges again.

  “Well?” Houston asks when Sal draws up alongside him.

  Sal shakes his head. “Let’s go sit down somewhere that isn’t crooked.”

  Houston follows him to the Two-Way grill, where they belly up to the dining bar. The waitress leaves them waters and an ashtray, perhaps taking in their serious expressions and knowing they need it.

  “They know him in there, but nobody has any beef. He’s a ‘steel boy’ they said. His older brothers play ball,” Sal explains, looking forward and into the distance. “He just plays around. No one takes him seriously. They think maybe even he’s a goodie two shoes. Stays in the lines.”

  Sal sighs. “He’s not a threat, so I believe what they said.”

  “Why wouldn’t they give you the truth?” Houston asks.

  “Same reason the cops wouldn’t hand me a badge, Mars,” Sal says. “I got connections they don’t like. Mob doesn’t like cops, cops don’t like the mob. I’m in the cold either way.”

  “I like your connections,” Houston offers, trying to make a joke of it. It falls short, landing somewhere in left field.

  “You are my connections,” Sal says blandly.

  Houston gives a single syllable chuckle.

  “What about those other places?” Sal asks.

  “Better to go after six,” Houston checks his watch. It’s barely three. “The regulars will be there, and they’ll remember him.”

  “How are you so sure? What if he used an alias?”

  Houston takes a long sip of water, shaking his head. “Everybody uses aliases. They’ll know.”

  Sal doesn’t challenge him on it. Instead he tucks into his sandwich. Houston follows suit. He hasn’t eaten anything since the soup the night before, and Houston’s hunger wa
kes after the first bites of food. He polishes it off quickly, and follows it down with the hefty side of fries that he finds hidden beneath the sandwich.

  Sal eats more sparingly, finishing only half of his meal and then pushing his plate aside in favor of a Lucky Strike. Houston salvages his leftovers, and Sal doesn’t protest.

  “So,” Sal says as Houston chews the last of his sandwich. “You said I should ask you about how you knew about flighty people sometime when you weren’t mad at me.”

  Houston is surprised he remembers. He scrubs his fingers on a paper napkin. “It’s a long story.”

  “We got until six.”

  “Alright,” Houston concedes. “But not here.”

  They both ease back off the counter stools, and Houston pays the bill, leaves a tip that means the waitress can probably eat her own dinner.

  Outside, the air is promising to stay above freezing until the sun goes down. The streets cut new black lines in the snow, and water runs along these channels. Houston follows where the street leads, tucking his hands into his coat pockets until he comes up with his pack of cigarettes. He smokes while they continue moving.

  “I didn’t get back stateside until 1920,” Houston begins from the beginning, though Sal already knows some of it. It helps him line things up in his mind, keeping track of what he wants to cover, laying the facts end to end. It’s easier in retrospective. “I’d been in the medical reserve. The fighting was over but the suffering goes on long after. You know.”

  Sal’s hand makes an absent gesture to press against the small of his back over the scar. He knows.

  “I came back wild,” Houston admits. “There was no victory parade, nothing but prohibition and jazz to greet us. So, for a while, I let whatever was going to happen come. Speakeasies. Easy company. Back alleys.”

  Sal doesn’t say anything. He fishes in his pockets for his pack of cigarettes.

  “There comes a point when a man watches enough other men die, making helpless overtures, that the end of his soul rots out like the bottom of a paper rowboat,” Houston says. He looks straight ahead, walking on so the past doesn’t drag him to a stop. “Man’s got two options, then. You either reach down into that black, rotten place in your soul and plant something that will grow, or you figure it for loam and bury yourself.”