By Ed Staskus

   When Steve de Luca worked at his brother’s east side used car lot, he came across stray dogs all the time. He would pick them up, bring them home, take them to the vet, get them repaired, feed them to bursting, and find them homes. Although he didn’t live or work on the east side anymore, whenever Steve or his wife Maggie Campbell saw a stray, they stopped the car and did something about it.

   After they moved to West Park they got a reputation for stealing dogs from people who mistreated them. It started after a lady mailman, who had been delivering mail to a nearby house for several years, and who always saw a dog in the back yard, noticed as the year was morphing into fall that the dog was getting skinny and skinnier. She found out the homeowner had gotten another dog and was starving the skinny dog in the back yard to death.

   When she complained to Animal Control they told her the dog wasn’t being visibly mistreated. She was distraught. One day she was telling a friend, somebody who knew Steve and Maggie, about the poor creature.

   “I know these crazy awesome people that will go steal that dog,” the friend said. “Just give me the address.”

   “Really?”

   “Yeah.”

   The mail lady gave the friend the address of the skinny starving dog. The friend passed it on to Steve and Maggie.

   It was Thanksgiving night. The plan was set, but they sat down at the table first. They had dinner, cracked a couple of beers, tuned in to a football game, set the alarm for 2:30 AM, and went to bed. When they woke up it was storming, lightning and thunder.

   “That’s a good sign,” Steve said. “In case the dog barks the thunder will hide the barking.”

   “What about the lightning flashes? Won’t they light us up?”

   Steve didn’t say anything. He pulled on a balaclava. Maggie whipped up a handkerchief as a mask.

   They filled their pockets with turkey leftovers. When they got to the dog’s house, it was pitch as a tar pit. They walked up to the fence and the dog came running. Steve unlatched the gate. The dog came to the gate and sniffed him up and down. They gave the dog some turkey. He was hungry and ate all they had. When he was done they went right to the car together. The dog was more than glad to go.

   The next morning they called the mail lady.

   “We have the dog,” Steve said.

   “What? You have her?”

   “Yeah, you want to pick her up?”

   The next day, when the mail lady walked up to their front door, she looked around in all directions like it was a drug deal. Many people think dogs are their property, but when dogs are mistreated, Maggie didn’t care about anybody’s philosophy of property. If you’re starving a dog, you should have it taken away from you. When you chain a dog up, and get a kick out of it, you need some mental health. You’re one step away from being slime. You’re one step closer to crime and punishment.

   A friend of theirs in Lakewood had one of their rescues. They kept in touch. She called them one day and said her neighbor two houses down was kicking and whipping his dog. “He leaves the dog in his stinking garage all day, too.” She was in tears. “I can’t take it anymore.”

   “Can’t you do anything?”

   “I’m afraid of him, but I can’t let the dog live like that.”

   “The minute he goes somewhere call us, we’ll get the dog,” Maggie said. “The guy won’t give us any lip, if he knows what’s good for him.”

  When she called them, Steve and Maggie walked right into the man’s garage. The service door wasn’t locked. They took the dog, who was in bad shape, because the man had been taking his belt and whipping the bejesus out of it. The man came out on his front porch with a fried chicken leg in his hand.

   “If you treat a dog like that, I can’t imagine how you treat your wife and kids,” Maggie said. 

   “Go back inside,” Steve said. He patted the pocket of his jacket. The man went back inside his house.

   Steve rescued a young pit bull bait dog who was being forced to fight after Maggie’s niece-in-law’s sister told them about it.

   “You stay home, just in case there’s trouble,” Steve told Maggie.

   It was seven o’clock in the morning. He walked up to the backyard, where there was no food, no water, and no shelter, and pulled the dog up by his collar over the fence. The next minute he was gone. That was that. 

   It’s not always that easy, although sometimes it can be. They were told about a Great Dane in the Hough neighborhood on the east side that was left alone chained to an outdoor post all day and night in all kinds of weather. When they got there, they found out the homeowner was on vacation. His neighbor approached them.

   “I’m here to take the dog,” Steve said.

   “What are you going to do with him?”

   “We’re going to find him a better home than this hole.”

   “OK by me.”

   Steve cut the dog’s chain with a bolt cutter and they took him away.

   Most of the dogs they rescued they found by word-of-mouth or on Facebook. Maggie had lots of dog rescuer friends on social media. Whenever they rescued a dog, they took it to a vet, and then took it to their house where it could play with their own dogs. Steve and Maggie worked hard to find them homes. 

   “Those dogs are put in our path for a reason. That reason is to help them. We find the money for it all by praying.”

   They had a vet who had been helping them for a long time. They took a dog to him that Steve found running in the street. The owners of the dog were chasing him. A chain was clanking on the concrete behind him and there was a padlock on his neck, a padlock that was so tight it was embedded in the skin. Steve scooped him up on the fly through the door of his moving car and sped away down the street. He gave the owners the finger.

   “This is the cruelest thing ever,” the vet said.

   Steve rescued dogs all the time. He found one when he saw some guys stopped at the side of the road and saw they were yelling and throwing rocks at a dog.

   “What the hell are you doing?”

   “Nuthin!” one of them yapped. “What’s it to you?”

   “I’m making it my business,” he said, walking straight at them, keeping his right hand in his pocket like he had something in it that meant business. They got in their car and took off. Steve pulled out the pack of Wrigley’s Doublemint he had in his pocket and unwrapped a stick.

   Another day he found a spitting mad mastiff in the bushes, won its trust, and the next thing anybody knew there was Steve with the dog eating out of his hand. He found a white and tan mutt the same way, on a street somewhere, escaping from who knows what. Maggie was making meatball soup when he brought the dog home. She gave some soup to the dog.

   “What are we going to do with her?” Steve asked.

   “We’re going to keep Gretel,” Maggie said.

   “Gretel?”

   “That’s her name,” she said.

   Gretel was the sweetest dog ever. It made their day the day she came to live in their home. They never found a Hansel for her, but kept her safe and sound until the day she went to the Rainbow Bridge.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.” His books are available on Amazon and Apple Books.

“Bomb City”

Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. It gets personal. Revenge is always personal.