Autumn weather finally arrived in the middle of December, when, among other absurdities that were fashionable in Houston, holiday decorations were garish downtown. But even more outrageous was the latterly annual creating of an out-door ice skating rink, the refrigeration for which might have easily consumed enough energy to have brought many a developing third-world nation into modern times. Patrons skated on the stuff and were appropriately giddy, but the truth was, they plowed through slush.
Houston was also a kind of winter Mecca for those homeless souls who could get themselves there from more northerly climes. I couldn’t adequately imagine having to sleep on the street in the winter in places like Chicago, Detroit, or Philadelphia. Under cover of the Bayou City’s downtown overpasses, seasonal resorts of open air sleepers and cardboard accommodations were not unfamiliar sights. There was a kind of social patience for the increase in panhandling during the festive season that then turned into militant operations to halt it after the first of each New Year.
The Kiam building was a popular gathering place for the homeless because of the running water in the fountain on the corner, along with public benches, several recessed doorways, and the covered structure out on the median for those waiting for the light rail train that stopped at that intersection. Plenty of shelter, hydration, and places to sit. I was used to stepping around and over the winter snowbirds as I entered the side door on Preston heading to my third floor office. As with all human interaction, there was protection of territory, status, and code among those living on the street. I’d acquired a gaunt, long-haired, bearded troll very early in the fall, who obtained squatter’s rights to the place closest to the door. He had a dog in tow with matted fur. Whenever I arrived at the building, or left it, he was seated against the brick wall, head bowed, as if asleep or in meditation or alcoholic twilight. I named him Rasputin. The dog, equally as gaunt, was given to mange. It hung its head after the manner of its master. It never barked or soiled the sidewalk, and it appeared devoted to the man who had attached himself to it.
Others soon formed a squatter’s community along the building on Preston. A couple I thought of as Bonnie and Clyde took turns using each other as pillows. A toothless man who wore a tireless smile nodded to himself continuously, as if everything he witnessed made sense. I thought of him as Mr. Wisdom. There were others who had yet to impress me with a characteristic strong enough to name.
Police would periodically roust them all out of their seized-upon locations and usher them on their way. Soon enough, when the coast was clear, they gathered again, each assuming his or her previous place of residence. Here’s where there was code involved: while they all did not re-congregate at the same time, claims on specific spots were preserved and respected until very soon after a scattering, a full complement of the recently dispersed once more shored up my corner at Preston and Main, each re-settled and in residence on a spot temporarily designated as home.
Several days before Christmas I was in my office standing by the windows facing Main, enjoying a second cup of coffee, waiting for a follow-up telephone call. Out of sight up Main toward the left, a commotion erupted, along with a sound I had not heard before. The light rail locomotive screamed as it came into view. Cascading along the track propelled by the train’s bull-nosed front end, the gangly form of a bearded man, as if being tossed about by roiling surf, bounced and rolled along the track until the train finally came to stop short of the platform full of those waiting to board at the Preston stop.
I settled my coffee mug on the antique church pew under the window and made for the stairs down to the side door where I customarily entered. Out on the sidewalk to my right, Rasputin’s lean and mangy dog lay on the concrete with its tongue extended from its mouth, and so still it had to be dead. I was slammed with a belated certainty that propelled me down the sidewalk and out into the center of Main Street, where a crowd had gathered around the front of the train. I pushed through the press of gawkers and knelt by the corpse of the man who had evidently stepped purposefully in front of the moving train. The joints of his body were so dramatically dislocated from having been pushed along like rolling sage brush that his composite mass had the angular organization of a cubist painting of the early 20th century. His eyes were wide open and were a crystal blue I had seen in only one other person. In addition, there was a black mole high on his cheek under the left eye. Even in death, a thing of beauty.
Reznikov.
He’d made a home by my door and had finally attached himself to the beating heart of another living creature until it beat no more and he was unable to resume his life of nomadic oblivion.
Someone said, “Anyone recognize him?”
I stood up. “I thought I did,” I said, “but I was wrong.”
“Fool just fell in front of the train,” said someone else.
I did not look down at Stefan Reznikov again, but returned to the curb and looked about, actually turning a full 360 degrees. The sidewalks were thick with holiday pedestrians. The world paid little attention to what had happened on the tracks. I was jostled by a man not watching where he was going, and I began to feel the press of too many people even in the wide open space of outdoors that tended to keep me inside for most of the holiday season. I headed back up to my office, after stopping to check that Rasputin’s dog had indeed died on the sidewalk and had propelled Reznikov toward the moving train. Rather Russian, that…throwing one’s self under a train.
As I climbed the stairs and listened to the sound of my own footfalls on the stair treads in the otherwise empty stairwell that echoed them in the manner of a march on time, I told myself that it was good alone, life. My life.
Yes.
Solitude.
Spare Parts: A Ted Mitchell Detective Novel (Ted Mitchell Detective Novels Book 4) Page 23