Cold Was The Ground

by B A Black

  Houston doesn't have anything to say. He needs to pull Sal close, to feel him solid and vital in his arms. Something changes about Sal's smile as he sees—whatever it is that he sees on Houston's face.

  He puts down the mug in his hands and crosses the space of Houston's living room in three long strides. He puts his arms around Houston, enveloping him at the same moment that Houston gets his good arm around Sal, tight and close until their chests are pressed together over the bump of his slung up arm.

  He leans in, tucking his chin over Sal's shoulder, going up on his toes. He can't help breathing deep, half ready for it to emerge again as a sob. Relief floods him when he doesn't detect any traces of opium smoke clinging to Sal's coat. It's what sets his keel even, eases his next breath out smooth.

  “What happened?” Sal asks.

  Houston shakes his head. “Lot of things, partner. Let me get my head straight and I'll tell you.”

  “You look like hell.”

  Houston doesn't feel too far off. He holds onto Sal for a long time. Too long, but it feels like his world is spinning again. His feet are cold, still wet in half frozen shoes, and he shivers, once, a great full-body motion. Sal doesn't rush him, even though Houston can feel him getting anxious, gathering kinetic energy.

  “Did you make enough coffee for both of us?” Houston asks. “I had a long night.”

  “Yeah,” Sal says. He steps back and then gestures at the hall table. “There's a Christmas card here from your parents.”

  Houston looks at the white square envelope. At his name written out in his mother's handwriting.

  “I have other things to deal with first,” he says, heading for the bed.

  It's empty. Neatly made like he'd left it, but the cat isn't there.

  “Did you move the cat?” Houston asks, perplexed.

  “He's in the kitchen.”

  “The body?”

  Sal looks at him like Houston just grew an extra head. “I fed him. He was begging. Figured that was okay.”

  Houston steps into the kitchen, sure there's some mistake. But there, blinking up at him over an empty bowl on the floor, is the cat. Luminous yellow eyes clear. Alert.

  Houston sits down abruptly in the doorway and laughs uncertainly when the cat crawls into his lap. His fur is still cold and wet from melted snow, but the cat purrs.

  “You wanna explain?” Sal asks behind him. “Because you are acting very queer, Hobbes. Like the cold's got to you. It's starting to worry me.”

  Houston unfolds his night for Sal, sitting on the kitchen floor and holding a black cat who he guesses is now named Chop Suey.

  [Epilogue.]

  The funeral is not so solemn and barren an affair as Houston expects. Perhaps Lucas is gone, but as the old cliche says, not forgotten. Houston puts his eyes on the crowd as he gets out of the car. He's in his best, having spent a small part of his take from the Winsome case on a press for his last good suit.

  He put on a tie that Lucas gave him in a better time, and retied it three times in a fit of stalling that would not hold off what he has come to face. It will never seem satisfactory. It's what passes for “Sunday Best” these days when even a Sears suit is a real luxury.

  They'd put off the autopsy until after the first, the initial report suggesting nothing sinister.

  The cut revealed nothing unexpected; quick and clean, in and out so that the coroner could go on to the next body and Lucas could go into a box. Exposure. Why didn't he come to me, if he was back in the city?

  Houston steps into the funeral home, avoiding his grim-faced reflection in the hall mirror, his red-rimmed eyes avoiding even his own gaze. He has not handled this with the stoicism of his father. None of his life, he supposes, adheres to those austere tenants. The funeral was a rush job, a quick affair cobbled together the instant anyone could find out when the autopsy was scheduled.

  An hour ago he shut the cat into his apartment, straightened his shirt and cufflinks and prepared to face these answers alone. It was like closing the door on a chapter of his life. The world inside this house moves at a snail's pace, a quiet somber organ playing somewhere and dozens of people shuffling past the coffin to pay last respects.

  Houston recognizes some from the Sappho. No one approaches him. If the family is here, they stay apart. It's so out of tune with the reckless exuberance that Lucas lived that Houston hopes the man's soul has long departed this coil, shuffled off to the next swing joint—the speakeasy of the afterlife.

  He can't bear to watch the box go into the ground so Houston excuses himself after the visitation. He leaves the parlor and goes to smoke in the parking lot. The flame of his match is small in the face of the world. The smoke warms his lungs. He leans against the hood of the car he borrowed from Sal, and looks up at the uninterrupted gray of the sky.

  If there is a God up there, Houston doesn't know whether to thank Him or curse Him.

  In the distance he can see the Chicago skyline stabbing upwards, Babels at the sky. Somewhere to the east, the lake is emitting fog from its last unfrozen vestiges. A sudden desire takes hold—not in Houston's heart but behind it. He has to know, has to understand what led one man away from his door all those years ago, only to make a terminal circuit. Are they all running on tracks and timetables?

  If that's so, and some dark grey-ghost part of Houston's heart is inclined to believe it is, are all efforts to run off the rails met with as brutal and swift an upset as engines careening silently into the abyss below the bridge? One seemingly long moment of plunging, screaming madness before the fall was over?

  Houston shakes off these thoughts, putting his cigarette out on the freezing tarmac.

  The snow begins softly to fall on January 4th, 1931.

  [The End.]

  B.A. Black is an Arizona based author who divides time between several enthusiasms, though the first will always be writing. Four cats share the house and each lends a little helping hand to the personality of Chop Suey, as well as distracting from further work on the next Houston Mars novels. Cold Was the Ground is the first of Black’s published works.

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