the man in the bushes

I live on a hill in Los Angeles. It's a not a big hill. It has just enough of an incline to tax your breathing slightly while walking up it. That's what I do. I walk down it in the morning and then back up in the evening. Sometimes while I'm walking up and down the hill I see homeless men sitting in the bushes by the side of the road. Sometimes they're talking to eachother. Sometimes they're just watching the street and the people on the street who are usually going somewhere else in a great hurry. On one occasion one of the men spoke to me. It was a cold, windy day, and the sun was just disappearing under the smoggy horizon. "Aren't you cold?" the brown, bearded face asked me. "Freezing," I replied, never breaking my stride up the hill.

A few days ago, while I was walking home from work, I saw a coroner's truck and a police car parked at the foot of the hill. The coroner's truck had the words "CORONER" written on it. As I approached, I saw that there were people standing in the bushes, looking at something on the ground. A female police officer stood on the sidwalk. She appeared to be standing guard, or at she least thought she should appear to be doing so. She was smiling. She was very important. I stopped walking and looked into the bushes. I still couldn't see what it was that everyone was looking at.
"What happened?" I asked the officer.
"It's okay, some guy just got real sick," she replied soothingly.
"Did he die?"
"Yeah..." she said with a drawn out tone of mild regret. She almost stopped smiling.
"Oh." I couldn't think of anything else to say.
She told me then to move along, smiling and waving her hands in a gentle shooing motion. I moved along, and kept walking up the hill.

The next day, I thought of the dead man in the bushes as I walked home. I wondered how he had died. I wondered if he had had a family. I wondered if they knew he was dead. I wondered if they cared. I wondered about many things as I neared the place where the man had died. I looked into the bushes as I started up the hill. Someone was sitting in the same spot where the body of the dead man had lain yesterday. He was young, no more than thirty. He didn't have a beard, but a surprisingly well-trimmed mustache. He looked like he had been crying. I thought about stopping to question him. I could have asked him if he had known the dead man. I could have asked him if he knew the man's name. But I didn't stop. I kept walking up the hill.