By Ed Staskus

   I was ten years old the first time I saw a dead man. It was the morning of Holy Saturday. The sky was low and thick with clouds. It looked like it might rain any minute. My best friend Feliksas, a Lithuanian kid like me who everybody called Felix, and I had walked to the VFW hall behind the Gulf gas station at the corner of Coronado Ave. and St. Clair Ave.  It was a log cabin-like building with dusty windows. We didn’t have anything in mind except seeing the sights and messing around. We liked to slip behind the steering wheels of unlocked cars waiting to be repaired in the lot next to the gas station and pretend adventures on dangerous roads.

   When Felix noticed flashing lights on St. Clair Ave. we went around the corner to the front of the gas station. There were two black and white Cleveland Police Department prowl cars and an ambulance there. We called their rotating lights gumball machines. We called the sirens growlers. The black and white ambulance was a Ford station wagon that was both a police car and an ambulance. A policeman was standing around doing nothing while another one kept the crawling traffic on the other side of the street on the move. The traffic on our side was filtering down side streets. The ambulance men were standing beside their black and white station wagon smoking cigarettes.

   We stood to the side of a cluster of grown-ups who were tossing glances at the dead man on the ground. Nobody was saying much. We stepped closer to the man until we were standing over him. We looked down at him. He was lying on his back, partly on the sidewalk and partly in the street. He was wearing a white shirt and a plaid jacket. One of his shoes was missing. The other one was a tasseled loafer. One of his front teeth was cracked from when his face hit the concrete going down.

   The front of his white shirt, open at the neck, was a blob of red. Some of the red was damp while the edges of the blob were going lifeless. Flies were buzzing around him. We  jumped when the dead man moaned.

   “Do you need some help?” Felix asked

   “Getting bumped off is the only help for being alive,” the dead man said in a low tone of voice.

    Felix stepped up to the stone-faced policeman doing nothing. “That man is trying to say something,” he said.

   “That man is dead,” the policeman said. “Leave him alone.”

   “Who is he?” I asked. I had never seen him in our neighborhood before.

   “He was a hoodlum.”

   “Did you shoot him?”

   “No, not us. He spun the big wheel and lost.”

   “What’s the big wheel?”

   “Never mind kid.”

   There was a dark green car parked between the gas pumps and the station. It had white wall tires. We went over to look at it. The windshield was smashed, like somebody had thrown a rock through it. We looked inside. There was dried blood on the front seat. When I looked up I saw ‘Happy Motoring!’ stenciled on the plate glass windows of the station. We turned back to the street.

   “Tell them not to bury me in the Glenville Cemetery,” the dead man said.

   Glenville Cemetery was a graveyard next to the New York Central railroad tracks not far away. It lay in a triangle of land between St. Clair Ave. and Shaw Ave.  We could walk there down E. 129^th St. in ten minutes. We always passed it on our way to the Shaw Hayden Theater where we went to see  monster movie matinees.

   “Too many Jews,” the dead man said. “And now they’re burying niggers there.”

   What does it matter, I thought, even though I didn’t know very much about Jews or niggers. I didn’t know much about graveyards, either.  I always wondered what my father meant  when he said he had to work the graveyard shift. How much work do the dead need done for them? I had never been to a funeral, except for two funerals at St. George Catholic Church, where I was training to be an altar boy. I had sat in a back pew those two times and observed the goings-on as part of my training. I dozed off during the second service.

   I noticed the knot of grown-ups was gone. The stone-faced policeman and the ambulance men were still standing around waiting for something. The other policeman was standing on the corner waiting for the traffic light to change, except there weren’t any more cars. There wasn’t anybody in sight. There wasn’t a single person going into a single store even though it was shopping day. St. Clair Ave. was usually busy with women shopping at the A & P and all the other stores. Nobody seemed to be going home with a ham for Easter. Where was everybody? 

   A young woman came running down the street, pushed past the policemen, and threw herself on top of the dead man. Her hair rolled down her shoulders. The curls of her hair smelled like wet ashes. She started to cry, quietly rubbing the tears off her face with the sleeve of her dress.

   The dead man wiggled a forefinger and motioned for me to come closer.

   “Do a pal a favor, kid,” he said. “I don’t want her to cry over me and I don’t want her asking me for anything. Get her off me and help her home. It’s just around the corner. I was on my way there when I got mine.”

   The two ambulance men lifted her off him, got her steady on her feet, and Felix and I helped her back to her apartment. She lived on the second floor of a two story brick building on Dedman Ct. a block away on the other side of Lancelot Ave. It looked like nobody lived there. Most of the windows and the front door were broken. The roof was partly caved in. The lawn was choked with weeds.

   “Nobody lives here except me,” she said.

   “Was that man your boyfriend?” Felix asked.

   “No, my boyfriend disappeared two years ago, on the second day of 1959. I heard he joined the merchant marine, hauling ore on the Edmund Fitzgerald.” The Edmund Fitzgerald was the biggest boat on the Great Lakes. “Whoever that is lying on the cement over there looks like he’s got a free pass to the graveyard down the street.”

   “He asked us to make sure he wasn’t buried there.”

   “I don’t know why. He always said he was Italian, but he was half Jewish and half Negro, too.” 

   She turned to Felix. “Isn’t your name Feliksas?” she asked.

   “Yes, how did you know?”

   “Do you know your name means lucky?”

   “No, I didn’t know, nobody ever told me. How do you know my name?”

   “I know everybody’s names, everybody in this neighborhood, everybody on their way to the boneyard, where everybody is going, sooner or later, trying to not hear their own hollow footsteps. Forgiveness of sins and resurrection of the flesh.” Felix’s eyes got wide. I was getting spooked. A crow on top of the roof cawed three times.

  “What was your boyfriend’s name?” Felix asked.

   “I don’t know,” she said. “I think it was Frankie Paramo, but I’m not sure anymore. I’m starting to forget what he looked like.” She leaned against a shadow. Her face was going limpid. “May he rest in peace,” she said. Her voice was a thin lament. We went down the front walk to the sidewalk. When we turned to wave goodbye she wasn’t there anymore, like she had never existed.

   The gas station was in front of us before we knew it. I felt torpid and restless at the same time. The dead man was where we had left him. We took a step over to where he was. He looked up at the sky and said, “Life, what did you ever do for me? It’s my turn now. I’m not going to do anything for you anymore.”

   His words were muffled. His eyes were like dull marbles. Felix yawned like he was nervous. When we glanced at the dead man again he was blurry like there was an eclipse of wet moths around him flapping their wings. A dog barked monotonously in a backyard on Coronado Ave.

   A four-door Oldsmobile raced down St. Clair Ave. “What the hell does he think he’s doing,” one of the policemen groused. Not everybody saw the big car go past. It was like trying to see a falling star during the day. Felix said it was his Uncle Gediminas. Most of the Lithuanians in Cleveland lived in Glenville, although all of them were moving to North Collinwood. I had heard my father tell my mother one night they would have to start looking for a new house soon, or urban renewal would make our family home worthless. I didn’t know what urban renewal meant, although it sounded bad. I knew worthless meant bad. 

   Uncle Gediminas was an middle-aged undersized man with an old man’s turkey neck. He was an accountant and could afford a new car whenever he wanted one, even though he unfailingly bought used cars that burned oil. “He’s always staring down his kids,” Felix said. “All his kids are afraid of him. He bosses them around day and night.” 

   The street was full of echoes, even though the few people on the street weren’t saying anything. It felt like somebody was following us. We looked everywhere but couldn’t spot anybody.

   “Do you want to wait for him to die?” Felix asked.

   “I don’t think he has much time left even though the policeman said he’s already dead.”:

   “Not dead enough,” said a man walking past. His hair was shiny with Brylcreem and he was wearing a bowling alley shirt. He spit in the gutter before crossing St. Clair Ave.

   “Let’s wait,” I said to Felix.” I don’t want to just sneak away.”

   “You found out I’m not long for this world?” the dead man said. “I’ve known that for a while now, since the beginning. I don’t like it when people talk about me like I’m not here. You kids should go home where you belong.”

   “Is your name Frankie?” Felix asked.

   “Yeah.”

   “Do you believe in Heaven?”

   “I believe in Hell.”

   The sky got dark. It started to rain. It was a steady rain. The ground got full of worms. The dead man started to melt. When he started melting there was no stopping him. Five minutes later he had come undone and was a pile of mud. One of the policemen stepped up to him. “There’s no sense in getting worked up about it. Call off the pathologist. Call the fire department instead. They can hose him down the drain. It will save the taxpayers the trouble of an autopsy and a burial.”

   We were soaking wet after a minute of rain. We got chilled and goosebumps popped up on our arms and legs. Felix ran home down Coronado Ave. and I ran home down Bartfield Ave. Even though it was storming and had gotten darker, none of the houses were lit up. They were all shade and shape. We lived in a side-by-side Polish double that my parents bought on the cheap with my father’s sister and her family when they had emigrated to the United States.

   Our front door was locked. I ran to the back door. It was locked. I knocked but nobody came to the door. I kicked at it but still nobody came to let me in. I went into the backyard to the tornado doors. They were never locked. One of the doors had a handle. I pulled on the handle. The doors were locked.

   A German widow lived next door to us. Her husband was dead and her children had moved away. She was alone in the world. In a week she would be one hundred years old and her solitude would be full-fledged. I ran to her house. She was sitting on a lawn chair in the middle of her basement. A small storage room was where she kept her canned goods. She kept carrots, radishes, and potatoes in bins. She was writing in a spiral-bound memo pad. 

   Her memory was on the fritz. She wrote notes and Scotch taped pictures in her pad. There were pictures of my father, mother, brother, sister, and me, and our names in the pad. There were pictures of her fridge and stove and what they were called, which was fridge and stove. There were diagrams of all her rooms and everything in the rooms, what they were for and what they were called. There was a scrap of paper pinned to the front of her house dress. Her name, Agatha, was written on the paper in block letters.

   “My stomach is shriveled up from hunger,” she said, even though she had enough food stored in the basement to last a year. She often forgot to eat. My parents checked up on her every few days.

   “Where is everybody?” I asked.

   “Your family is all in the house. They are watching the TV. They will be sorry if a tornado comes. I told them so, but they wouldn’t listen.”

   “Can I borrow the key to get into our basement?”

   She had it in a pocket of her apron. She handed it to me. I unlocked the doors and swung them open. The concrete steps led to the cellar. They were slippery with slime. It was where our father told us we had to go whenever there was a tornado. He told us about the last one in Cleveland in 1953 that killed nine people, injured three hundred, and left two hundred homeless when their homes were blown away. “The cellar will protect us from high-speed winds and flying debris,” he said.

   I ran up the stairs to our kitchen. All the lights in the house were on. My  brother and sister were arguing on the living room floor while my parents watched the weatherman on the TV. We had an old Zenith. The only time it worked right was when there was a clear sky. There was a clap of faraway thunder. The TV went fuzzy. I couldn’t understand a word the weatherman was saying.

   “Where have you been?” my mother demanded. “You’re all wet. Go change your clothes before you catch your death of cold. And don’t touch the Easter ham. That’s for tomorrow.”

   “I didn’t know you were home,” I said. “The house was dark and locked up.”

   “What do you mean dark and locked up? Your father and I went grocery shopping but got back an hour ago. It was so busy out there. What with this gloom in the middle of the day, the house has been lit up since we got home.”

   My brother, sister, and I slept upstairs in the front bedroom. Our sister slept in a corner. Our parents slept in the back bedroom. They needed privacy by night. There was a bathroom and a linen closet. I dried off with a bath towel. I changed my clothes and sat on my bed looking out on Bartfield Ave. All the houses on the street were suddenly bright in new sunshine. The police cars and ambulance in front of the Gulf gas station were gone. The pile of mud that had been the dead man was gone. A firemen had a hose on the ground, where he had flattened it, and was rolling it up to put back on the pumper. 

   I ran up the street and found Felix on his way to meet me. We got our bikes and rode down Eddy Rd. and through the village of Bratenahl to Gordon Park on the Lake Erie shoreline. The sun made the mist in the air sparkle and bent the light. We sat on the edge of an overhang on a steep bank of the lake and watched a rainbow hover in the sky until it vanished off the face of the earth.

Photograph by Fred Lyon.

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. 

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC, from stickball in the streets to the Mob on the make.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn. New York City, 1956. President Eisenhower on his way to the opening game of the World Series. A hit man waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

By Ed Staskus

   The day my nephew, who was going to be known by the name of Ike from that day on, told me he was changing his name to Wyatt, all I could think of saying was, “Why?” He looked up from his Xbox. He was sitting in a special gaming chair. There was carnage all over the big screen. The game was called Streets of Rage. It looked like everybody was losing.

   “What do you mean, why?” he asked.

   It turned out he had watched the horse opera “Tombstone” the night before and been enchanted by Wyatt Earp.

   “That might not work,” I said. 

   “Why not?”

   “Wyatt Earp was a lawman through and through. Your law-abiding ways are sketchy at best.”

   “Oh, right, I see what you mean. How about Doc, like Doc Holliday? He was smack.”

   “He was that, but he’s more along the lines of a Greek tragedy. I don’t see you as tragic.”

   “Hell no, I’m not tragic. The girls wouldn’t like that.”

   “How about Ike?” I suggested.

   “Who’s that?”

   “He was one of the cowboys in the movie, fast with a gun.”

   “OK, that sounds good. Ike it is from now on.”

   I didn’t tell him Ike was one of the bad cowboys who had tried to kill Wyatt Earp at the OK Corral.

   Ike was smart enough to make the grade and get admitted into St. Edward High School but scatterbrained enough to get suspended. St Ed’s is a Catholic school in Lakewood, Ohio in the Holy Cross tradition. Thousands of teenage boys apply to get in every year. A couple of hundred make it. Ike  had enough applesauce in him to not get expelled. He made it to graduation day by the skin of his teeth.

   He wasn’t so lucky at Cleveland State University. CSU is a state school. So long as your high school grades are somewhere near consciousness there is no problem getting admitted. After one thing and another he was told in no uncertain terms he had to find another school. When he left CSU, leaving his student housing apartment in need of disaster relief, he started looking for another place to live.

   His problem was no landlord with even a grade school education would rent to him. He camped out at his sister’s apartment until she said he had to go. His father suggested his uncles. He stayed with one after another until the last one told him he had to go. He stayed at my mother’s house, throwing parties for his friends whenever she broke a leg and was recovering at the Cleveland Clinic or had a stroke and was recovering at the Welsh Home in Rocky River. 

   When my brother asked me to throw some work his son’s way, I was of a mind to say no. It was almost the first thing I said. It was what I should have said. I had already hired Ike to waterproof our basement walls and repaint the concrete floor some months earlier. Every time I looked, he was easing himself down onto one of our lawn chairs and lighting up. He liked to smoke reefer rather than attend to the job at hand. When he wasn’t blazing, he was talking on his cell phone. In the end it was such a makeshift effort that I spent almost as much time in the basement as he had done, following up on his no effort work.

   I thought, that’s the last time. What I said, though, when my brother asked, was OK. I could have kicked myself.

   I worked more-or-less full-time for Light Bulb Supply in Brook Park. There were no brooks or parks anywhere in Brook Park. The biggest greenspace was Holy Cross Cemetery, 240 acres of it, across the street. I went there for walks instead of taking lunch whenever the day was dry and sunny. The office work more-or-less paid the bills. It was a family business, however, and I wasn’t a part of the family. I wasn’t going to get anywhere by relying on their good will, of which there was little. It was like my paycheck, on the stingy side.

   I got ahead by repairing tanning equipment part-time, on my own time, stand-ups and lay-downs, at tanning salons, beauty salons, gyms, and people’s homes. Indoor tanning was booming. I bought a tool box and electrical tools. I taught myself how to do it. My hourly rate was more, by far, than what Light Bulb Supply paid me. If it was an insurance job, I raised the price. If the insurance agent protested, I hung up.

   Allstate Insurance sent me to Dearborn, Michigan to inspect a tanning bed that had been under water for a few days in a family’s basement rec room. They found out their sump pump had failed when they got home from vacation. I drove there on a Saturday morning. It was going to be an all-day job getting there and back.

   Dearborn is just west of Detroit. and home to the most Muslims in the United States. It is also home to the largest mosque in the country. I thought I would stop and check it out. I got my signals crossed, missed the turn-off off I-75,  and missed the mosque. When I got to Detroit what I saw was an exit for Dearborn St. I took it. It was the wring exit. When all I saw were bars, funeral parlors, beauty shops, empty lots, and no white faces, I parked, found a phone booth, and called the folks with the soggy tanning bed. I told them where I thought I was.

   There was a pause. “Get back in your car and drive away from there right now,” the man of the house said. “It’s not safe.” There was no sense in tempting fate by sightseeing. I got back into my car and followed the Rouge River to Dearborn.

   I told Ike I had a job at a big tanning salon in North Royalton south of Cleveland. There were some repairs involved and re-lamping 9 or 10 tanning beds. It was going to take Ike and me a weekend and two or three nights. In the end it took me closer to a weekend and a week of nights. Ike was supposed to re-lamp during the day, since he was unemployed and had the free time, while I did the repairs at night, except he only showed up once and didn’t finish even one of the tanning beds.

   One day he wasn’t feeling well. His stomach hurt. Another day his garage door broke with his car inside it. Another day he didn’t bother to call to say he needed a mental health day. The last time before I told him not to bother anymore, he said the laundromat was closed and he didn’t have any clean clothes to wear to work. In the end I chalked it up to experience.

   “Nobody wants to hire me,” he complained, one of his many complaints. He seemed to think he could get the job done without going to work. He liked to say, “I don’t want to be tied down.” He didn’t want to be another cog in the wheel. There was little chance of that. Who wants a buzzkill of a cog?

   My brother asked my sister to let Ike move into her house. She lived nearby, had the space, but was reluctant. There was finally some peace and quiet in her house. She and her husband had split up. He had moved out and was on the road most of the time working as a long-haul trucker. Her daughter had graduated from Miami University and struck out on her own. There were two empty bedrooms. She could use the rent money. I suggested she get it up front.

   She told my brother she had reservations, especially since everybody knew Ike wasn’t just smoking reefer. He was selling reefer and branching out into fun pills. She didn’t want a drug dealer in her house.

   “He doesn’t have anywhere else to go,” my brother said.

   “What about your house?”

   “My wife doesn’t want him in our house.” His wife was Ike’s foster mother. She was a schoolteacher. Ike had been a student in her class during middle school. She probably knew what he was up to, although she was quiet as a mole snake about it.

   Ike was arrested one night in the middle of the night strolling down Detroit Rd. on the Cleveland side of its west side border. He was puffing on a stogie-sized spliff. It was the Dark Ages. Reefer was illegal. He was packing pills and cash in his pockets and having a high old time. A year later he appeared in court and was rewarded with intervention instead of jail time. My brother spent a small fortune sending him to assessment counseling treatment and prevention classes. I drove Ike to the classes now and then. He was like a honey badger talking trash.

   When he moved into my sister’s house, he brought clothes, shoes, and a safe with him. He kept the key to the safe on his person at all times. He moved into one of the vacant bedrooms. My brother paid his rent occasionally. Ike kept his clothes within easy reach and his shoes on display. “He thought nothing about buying $150.00 tennis shoes,” my sister said. “He had lots of them.”

   She didn’t ask what he kept in the safe. She didn’t want to know. One day she noticed one of the floorboards in his bedroom had been pried up and put back in place. When she looked under the board, she saw a green stash. She put the board back in its place. Boys and girls drove up to her house day and night, leaving their cars running at the curb. When they did, Ike ran outside, handed them something through their open car windows, and they gave him something in return.

   He texted his girlfriend a photograph of tens, twenties, and fifties fanned out across his bed cover. “Top of the world,” he seemed to be saying. When he was done with the display, he neatly packed the dough up and put it back in his safe. He was feeding the crocodile, hoping it would eat him last.

   My sister had told Ike, “No friends in the house.” A week later, pulling into her driveway after work, she saw more than a dozen boys and girls on her front porch and front steps. Two of them were sprawled over a railing. They were waiting for Ike. My sister called my brother.

   “Get over here right now and tell your son’s friends to leave.” 

   I happened to be driving by and stopped to see what was going on with the crowd on the front porch. When I asked if they were waiting for somebody, one of the youngsters on the railing said, “We are the ones we’re waiting for.” I assumed it was a smarmy Millennial trope. “Never talk to the monkey when the organ grinder is out of the room,” I said. “I understand,” the youngster said, which surprised me. I barely understood it myself. I left when I saw my brother’s car coming down the street and my sister storming down the driveway

   When Ike showed up, she asked him, “What do you not understand about no friends?”

   He was fluent when it came to complaining and explaining. Before he was done my sister cried uncle. “Just don’t let it happen again,” she said. He promised it wouldn’t happen again. It happened again and again. Ike could be sincerely insincere when he had to be.

   The driveway was delineated by the two houses on its sides. It wasn’t a wide driveway by any means. There was a grass strip on one side of the driveway but no buffer on her house’s side. Fortunately, Ike drove a compact car. Unfortunately, he had forgotten what he learned in driver’s education. He bounced off the house several times, denting his car, and ripping vinyl siding off the house.

   He liked to text my sister, asking if she needed anything done around his crash pad. When he wiggled down the driveway and hit the house he texted her, promising to fix it right away. He never did. He never did anything else, either, except breaking into the house through the back kitchen window whenever he locked himself out. Every time he did my sister had to replace the screen. A neighbor called the Lakewood Police Department when they noticed one of the break-ins, but Ike was able to explain it away. 

   After the intervention went bust, he was arrested again and charged with drug possession, possessing criminal tools, and a trafficking offense. He pled guilty since law enforcement had the goods on him. His charm, good looks, and a silver tongued lawyer carried the day. He was ordered to be drug tested on a week-to-week basis. 

   Something needed to save the day for my sister. She wanted Ike gone but didn’t know how to get it done. He was a blood relative and needed a place to live, even though he wasn’t willing to do what it takes to civilize an apartment and stock the shelves. It was a stand-off. My brother insisted there wasn’t anywhere else Ike could go. He had burned one bridge too many. She bit the bullet, but it tasted bitter.

   The magic bullet turned out to be the court-mandated drug-testing Ike was obliged to undergo. When spring turned to summer and summer turned to fall, he fell over his up-market tennis shoe laces and tested positive. Boys just want to have fun, even though I had told him not to squat with his spurs on. It meant the slammer. It meant he was packing up, shoes and safe and all. It meant my sister could slam and lock the door behind him the minute he left, which is what she did.

   The state of Ohio has the power to seize cash and property involved in drug trafficking. Asset seizures and forfeitures are a deterrent and a tool to take down criminal activity. “We generally seize assets that are believed to be the fruits of drug trafficking or used to facilitate the crime of drug trafficking,” Paul Saunders, a senior police official, said. “The courts have a litany of rules that are applied to each case to determine whether assets will be forfeited.”

   The last thing my sister needed was to have her home seized and taken away from her because of somebody else’s bad behavior. Fortunately, no searchlights were searching for her. She went back to mowing her lawn, walking her dogs, and watching “Law and Order” on TV.  When the crime drama wrapped everything up on a happy note, she went to bed snug as a bug with nothing bristling in her bonnet.

   I chewed on the idea of telling Ike who Ike really was, but never got around to it. It’s been said the truth will set you free. Sometimes it can feel good. Other times it can feel bad. I wasn’t in the advice business, however. I thought it best that Ike take whatever fork in the road he thought best.

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.

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC, from stickball in the streets to the Mob on the make.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn. New York City, 1956. President Eisenhower on his way to the opening game of the World Series. A hit man waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

By Ed Staskus

   When I lived on the far west side of North Collinwood there wasn’t anything unusual about a dog barking. What was unusual was barking that never stopped. The dog was an American pit bull who was chained all day long to a stake in a front yard two houses down. He had good reason to bark. He was a full-grown pooch, tan with a white chest. At night he vanished and the street was quiet.

   Nobody liked the barking, but nobody ever worked up the courage to say anything. The dog was Lou’s dog. Lou was some kind of gangster on our side of town.

   I walked Sylvester, my Great Dane, every day and night and avoided the barker, going the other way. There was no point in messing with his school of thought. One day I was preoccupied and there we suddenly were right in front of him. He was so surprised he didn’t make a peep. We crossed the street. He started barking up a storm. Before I knew it, he jerked, lunged, and ripped the stake out of the ground. In an instant he was running across the street at us snarling, the metal stake on the other end of the chain kicking up sparks behind him on the concrete.

   The west end of North Collinwood butts up to Bratenahl, which is its own posh enclave six miles from downtown Cleveland. The two neighborhoods couldn’t be any more different. In the 1970s Bratenahl’s median household income was wondrous and North Collinwood’s median household income was lousy. 

   Bratenahl is a village on the south shore of Lake Erie. It is one of Cleveland’s oldest streetcar suburbs, strategically cut off from the city to the south by railroad tracks and the Memorial Shoreway, bordered by Gordon Park on one side and the Northeast Yacht Club on the other side. The village police station is on the road that dips under the highway and becomes East 105^th St, the main north south artery in Glenville. Bratenahl is 98% white while Glenville is 98% black. The neighborhood is notorious for the late-60s Glenville Shootout, back when bussing was making headlines and racial tensions were boiling over.

   Bratenahl’s famous sons are too many to count, although they are trumped by Collinwood’s George Voinovich, 54^th mayor of Cleveland, 65^th governor of Ohio, and two-time United States Senator. Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel lived in Glenville when they were creating Superman. My neck of the woods was sketchy. There were wicked men in the shadows.

   I could have used Superman when the pit bull charged us. I had a Great Dane, though, who was no shrinking violet of a Clark Kent. I let him loose, he whirled on the pit bull, got behind and on top of him, and clamped his jaws on the back of the other dog’s neck. By the time Lou came running out of his house it was all over.

   He apologized up and down. I knew he was sincere because he was in the crime business and never went out of his way to apologize to anybody about anything. My dog sat on his haunches looking out into the distance while we talked. He was feeling like Bratenahl. The pit bull smoldered, his eyes going slit-like and red. He was feeling misunderstood.

   A thousand-some people live in Bratenahl within one tree-lined square mile. Twenty thousand-some people live in North Collinwood within three close-knit square miles. A two-bedroom two-bath unit in the Bratenahl Towers sells for between three and four hundred thousand dollars nowadays. There is a $1,000 monthly maintenance fee. A three-bedroom three-bath house in North Collinwood sells for a hundred thousand and change. Maintenance is up to you. It wasn’t much different in the 1970s.

   Lou was in his late 20s, single, and plenty of young women came and went. He drove a black 1973 Pontiac Luxury LeMans. It was one of the biggest cars on the road, the size of a rhino, cruising down the road like a Barco lounger. He never went into details, but everybody knew he worked for the underworld. Lou didn’t call it the Mob or the Mafia. He called it the Group. He made it sound like a fraternal outfit, getting together with the guys to chew the fat.

   John Scalish was the top dog. He took control in 1944 and stayed on the throne of blood for thirty-two years, taking his last breath in 1976 after hardened arteries got the better of him. His gang was allies of the Chicago Outfit and the Genovese Crime Family. Nobody asked what Lou did during the day, but we all knew when it got dark he hung out at the not-so-secret members-only nightclub around the corner on Lakeshore Blvd.

   It was a squat one-story building with a flat roof and no sign. There was a no fooling around steel entrance door. A hand-written square of cardboard taped to the back door said, “Keep Away” in block letters. A burly man in a blue Dodge Coronet lay low in the back of the parking lot from dusk to dawn, keeping his eyes open for troublemakers. The joint jumped with babes and booze. Lou worked the inside, making sure everybody stayed happy and keeping a semblance of order in play.

   My lodgings were on Westropp Avenue, a few blocks away. It runs parallel to Lakeshore Blvd. from East 140^th St. to East 152^nd St. It doesn’t end at East 152^nd, but becomes Waterloo Rd. My front porch was within spitting distance of Bratenahl. I stayed snug as a bug upstairs in the Polish double. Ray Sabaliauskas owned the house, living it up with the pint-sized Asian wife he had brought back from the Vietnam War.

   Although I had never had a dog and didn’t want one, I had a dog. He had been left behind when my brother’s fiancée was killed by a drunk driver out in the suburbs. My brother moved out the funeral. We had been roomies. I stayed because I could sort of afford to live on my own and liked being within walking distance of Lake Erie. The CTS 39B bus stopped right on Lakeshore Blvd., slowly but surely getting me downtown to Cleveland State University.

   The Great Dane’s name was Sylvester, although I called him called him Sly and the Family Stone. I walked him every morning and again in the evening. Our morning walk was so he could do his business and the evening walk was so he could do his business and stretch his legs. We crossed Lakeshore Blvd. to the open field between Bonniewood Dr. and Overlook Park Dr. Once there I removed his lead and he ran around like a nut. When he got it out of his system, we walked to the beach. In the winter, if the lake was frozen, we walked on the ice.

   Early on an overcast February evening, already as dark as midnight, we were about one hundred feet from the shore when Sly broke through the ice and fell into Lake Erie. He couldn’t get up and out, although he was able to keep his head above water. When I tried to walk to him the ice started cracking under my feet. I stopped. There wasn’t anybody anywhere except us. I had to get him out of the water. It was windy and his whiskers were going frozen icicles by the minute.

   I got on my belly and crawled to where he was. I had to be careful. If I fell in, we might both end up in Davey Jones’s locker. I grabbed his collar. He didn’t like it and pulled away. I got a better grip and yanked as hard and fast as I could, getting him halfway out. He got the idea and heaved himself out the rest of the way. When he tried to stand up his legs splayed apart and he flopped. I gripped his collar and we slowly on all fours made our way to land. I was wet and cold. Sly was wetter and colder. On the way home he stopped and shook himself all over trying to get dry. He got drier but got me wetter with the spray.

   It was warm inside the house. I rubbed Sly with bath towels, spread one on the floor in front of the living room space heater, and he lay down, licking the big wet spot he was. I filled the tub with hot water and took a long soak. The next day neither of us showed any aftereffects, except that Sly ate two big helpings of Bil-Jac in one sitting.

   In the winter Lou’s pit bull lived indoors. I hardly ever saw the dog. I saw Lou coming and going. He seemed to be on the go day and night. I thought he might be a runner for the Italian lottery in Hough and Glenville, picking up the bets and doling out the winnings. The Ohio Lotto was still more than a decade away.

   Even though Lou’s house and yard were bare bones, it was clear he had dough to burn. The lock on his front door was Fort Knox. He had a big car. The garage door lock was Fort Knox’s best friend. He dressed well and carried himself with confidence. He always had a roll of twenty-dollar bills held together by a rubber band inside his pants pocket.

   John Nardi controlled Teamsters Local 410. He wanted to control more. Leo “Lips” Moceri was known to be one of the most violent and ruthless criminals in the city. One day he walked into the council hall on East 22^ndStreet. “Keep your hands off the Akron rackets and get rid of Danny Greene,” Lips shouted at John Nardi.

   “I’ll do what I damn well please!” John Nardi shouted back.

   “Do you know who I am?” Lips exploded. “I’m Leo Moceri and no one pushes me around!” 

   They went their separate ways after spitting in each other’s faces. Lips got the better of it since he had more to work with. That weekend he went to the Feast of Assumption in Little Italy where he snacked on cannoli’s and pawed the bottoms of passing teenage girls. He disappeared on Monday. Two weeks later his car was found abandoned in the parking lot of an Akron motel. There were a pair of new shoes in the back seat. The spare tire was missing and the trunk was drenched in blood. Not a trace was ever seen of Leo Moceri again, dead or alive.

   What the John Scalish Crime Family was up to in Cleveland was loansharking, bookmaking, narcotics, and labor racketeering. They were also blowing up the Irish gangsters led by Danny Greene. Cleveland was known as Bomb City USA. Danny Greene found and disarmed bomb after bomb targeting him until he finally didn’t find the last one. John Nardi was planning on taking over the whole shebang, no matter what he had to do, bombs or no bombs. He later went to pieces the same as Danny Greene.

   One morning I noticed Lou’s pit bull was panting in the heat of the sun and his water bowl was empty. It was still empty when I got home from Cleveland State University. I filled it up, keeping a wary eye on the beast. He slurped it down. The next day it was empty again. I filled it up again and brought him dried kibble. The dog and I made a separate peace.

   The next week a truck from Animal Control Services pulled up to the curb. Two men got out, one of them threw treats to the side of the dog, and when he turned that way, the other man got a slip lead around his neck. They loaded him into the back of their truck. It was the last I saw of him. It was also the last I saw of Lou, who I hadn’t seen for a while. When he was found what was left of him was deposited in a closed coffin. 

   The funeral was at Holy Rosary Church on Mayfield Rd. Even though many of Holy Rosary’s pioneer members were immigrant stone cutters, the church is built of brick. There are life-size statues of saints on top of the facade and the east corner is topped by a domed cupola. It was the first Italian parish in Cleveland.

   After the mass and the procession to the burying ground went its way, I was lingering at the base of the flight of stairs to the street. A tight-knit group of men in black suits were talking nearby. They were smoking cigars and cigarettes. There was a white gray cloud over their heads.

   “What’s the word on what happened?”

   “It was the niggers in Glenville. They stabbed him bad and then emptied a Saturday night special into his face. He was a mess.”

   “Anybody on it?”

   “Yeah, the coons are going to pay, first with what they stole from him, and then for what they did to him.”

   “Who’s on it?”

   “Shon is on it.”

   Shondor Birns was a gangster from the Little Caesar days. Even though he specialized in the numbers and loansharking, he was mostly an enforcer on the streets and back alleys. By the time he was 13 he already had a reputation for violence. The neighborhood toughs steered clear of him as somebody not to be fooled with. He lived by his wits and his fists. When he was arrested for the twentieth time as an adult and indicted as an enemy alien, he beat the rap, but the deportation order against him remained in play. No other country would admit him, however, so he stayed in Cleveland.

   Lou’s car and the loot he was carrying were lost and not found. I never found out if his confederates resolved the issue, whether Shondor Birns made anybody pay up, or not. By the mid-1970s homicides in Cleveland were setting records with more than 300 of them a year. Ten years earlier there had been about one murder a week, not one murder a day. There were too many of them going around to pay attention to what happened to Lou. I forgot about him and put his homeless dog out of my mind.

   The next winter was just as cold as the one before it and even snowier. I took Sly and the Family Stone for walks along Lake Erie, but we stayed on the shore. The Great Dane sniffed up the ice but thought better of it. He knew where he wasn’t wanted. He romped on the frozen beach and the dunes, instead, flailing up and down snow drifts. There was no sense in putting himself and me in harm’s way on thin ice.

   The next winter was just as cold as the one before it and even snowier. I took Sly and the Family Stone for walks along Lake Erie, but we stayed on the shore. The Great Dane sniffed up the ice but thought better of it. He knew where he wasn’t wanted. He romped on the frozen beach and the dunes, instead, flailing up and down snow drifts. There was no sense in putting himself and me in harm’s way by setting foot on thin ice.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC, from stickball in the streets to the Mob on the make.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn. New York City, 1956. President Eisenhower on his way to the opening game of the World Series. A hit man waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

By Ed Staskus

   When Agnes was growing up everybody said her mother was the best-looking woman on the hill. Her mother’s hair was soft, not stiff like all the neighboring women, and she colored it champagne blond instead of the brassy yellow and bleached white that was popular. Eva was shapely with long legs, not skinny or fleshy, or too tall, but taller than her husband. When she walked, even when she was doing housework, she walked like a ballerina with hips. 

   They lived on a bluff above the factories on Euclid Avenue, in the Euclid Villas, on the western edge of the North Chagrin parkland, just a few miles from the Lithuanian neighborhood where Eva grew up. In the summer Eva, Agnes, and Sammy went picnicking in the reservation at Squires Castle and hiked through the trees at Strawberry Lane. The park bumped up to their backyard so that they were almost a part of it. Their street was a one-way street, the only one in the neighborhood. Nobody understood why it was one-way. There were deer that rubbed on the tree bark, raccoons that snuck into their attic, and possums in the woods where they played the knocking game at night.

   Eva always had to be doing something. Whether she was dancing or not she moved like she had never heard there isn’t anything that isn’t set to music. She sang all the time, too, even though she was tone deaf. At house parties all the husbands except hers wanted to be her partner. “There’s nothing faithful in it,” Eva’s husband Nick grumbled about his wife’s dancing. He had boxed Golden Gloves when he was younger. He didn’t mind dancing, but only his way. He was the son of a Romanian Saxon and liked small steps in place, rapidly changing steps, tapping and syncopated steps. He didn’t like ebb and flow dancing.

    Eva knew all the smooth moves, like the foxtrot and waltz, her favorites, and even honky-tonk twisting. She had studied ballet and danced with a Lithuanian folk group. She was tireless and never had to catch her breath, although she wouldn’t dance with just anyone, only with some of the men. “Never give a sword to a man who can’t hoof it,” she said winking and gliding away with whoever knew how to lead.

   When they went to weddings, she was on the ballroom floor all night, waltzing and trotting, but Anna, her best friend, knew she would never got in the middle of anybody who was married, like some other women, because that’s not what she wanted. She wanted to dance the room down and have a good time. Eva knew how to forget everything, even herself, but there was life bubbling up all the time inside her.

   She did all the shopping and housework. Before she had a car, she took buses and taxis to the grocery store. She made breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the three of them, and sometimes for Nick, too, if he wasn’t gone already. He worked all day, and when he wasn’t working, he was playing golf. He didn’t work around the house or even the yard. He hired kids to mow the lawn in the summer, rake leaves in the fall, and shovel snow in the winter. They were the only neighbors he knew or liked on the street, and they liked him because he always paid them on the spot with Lincolns. Whenever anything had to be repaired, he called Sears, and the next day a van would pull up in their driveway and the Sears man would ring the doorbell. Even though he had a Craftsman toolbox in the basement, the only thing anybody ever saw him do tool-wise was replace a light’s pull chain once, although he didn’t need a Craftsman to do it. 

   After Sammy got the first of his two-wheelers and they started breaking and falling apart because of his Evel Knievel smash-ups, he lugged them across the street for repairs. The man there was a big man who worked in a factory. He had wavy hair and a turnip nose. He knew how to fix everything. “What did you kids do today? And you better have done something,” he usually said, waving and rubbing his hairy hands together, pulling open the garage door, flipping the bike upside down on a workbench, and taking care of whatever was wrong with it. Nick couldn’t pump up their bike tires when they were low because he didn’t know where the inflator was in the mystery the garage was to him.

   Nick was hardly ever home for dinner, even on weekends. But he was always in his chair for the “Ed Sullivan Show” at eight o’clock every Sunday night, right after the family finished watching the “Wonderful World of Disney.” He looked forward to the comedians like Jackie Mason, Charlie Callas, and Senor Wences, but not the singers, especially not the Supremes, or any of the other Negro groups. He would go to the bathroom whenever they were announced and only come back when he heard Ed Sullivan’s voice again.  

   The most unfunny man Agnes ever saw on television was Ed Sullivan. He stood in the middle of the screen like a cigar-store Indian, arms folded across his gray suit lapels, his no personality eyes sunk into their late-night dark bags. “And now introducing on the show…” he said after the commercials were over, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, while Nick sank back into his sofa. Stoneface made “show” sound like “shoe.”

   Eva made dinner at 5:30 sharp every day, as though Nick was going to be at the head of the table like the other fathers on the street, which he hardly ever was. From the steps of their front porch Agnes could see, if she wanted to, Mr. MacAulay, Mr. Holloway, and Mr. Newman coming home from work. Her friends slapped bare feet out of their houses as their fathers came up the walk from their garages. That almost never happened at their house.  

   Whenever they knew their father was on his way home for dinner, they walked to the far end of Hillcrest Rd., and then to Grand Blvd. and to the blue collection mailbox on the corner. They lay on the sloping lawn of the Robinson house and looked for his car coming up the hill. Eva liked to say good things come to those who wait, but Agnes wanted him to come home so bad she couldn’t sit still, running back-and-forth.

   “Waiting wears out my patience,” she said when Eva called her back to the lawn, telling her to be patient. “I don’t have a lot of it and it runs out fast the more I have to wait.”

   The nights Nick was on time for dinner, instead of spaghetti and meatballs or the Dutch Oven chicken they liked best, Eva prepared beef brisket. She busted the family food budget, taking a taxi to Fazio’s, the big grocery store. Nick munched on crudités and dip before dinner and afterwards his favorite dessert was apple pie with cheddar cheese on it. Sammy and Agnes weren’t big fans, so they nibbled on hard-boiled eggs floating in mayonnaise. Eva made sure there was Neapolitan ice cream for them after dinner.

   Celery was Nick’s all-time favorite food, which caused a commotion one summer. Eva wanted dress fabric she had seen in a McCall’s sewing pattern and started skimming from the grocery money Nick gave her on paydays. He didn’t notice anything until the week she didn’t buy celery. Nick’s brother Tom was living with them that summer, painting their house for more than two months, and sleeping on a foam mattress in the laundry room. 

   Uncle Tom and Nick both made lists of what they liked to eat and gave the lists to Eva so she would know what they wanted. Before Tom came, she always made barbecue chicken for Sammy and Agnes on Friday nights, in Kraft’s Original Sauce, but she didn’t that summer after Tom told Nick that BBQ was out. Eva knew celery was Nick’s special food, but she thought he wouldn’t miss it for a week. What she didn’t know was that celery was Tom’s favorite, too, because she always threw his list away without looking at it.

   “How could you forget the celery? What were you thinking?” was all she heard from them day after day until Uncle Tom finally moved out the Labor Day weekend before school started. “I didn’t stop to think,” she told him, smiling and shuffling, “and then I forgot.” She didn’t tell him about the dress fabric she bought, especially after she sewed the dress and he never noticed how she looked in it.

   Nick ate some of a family-size ice-cold Hershey bar every day. He kept it in the freezer and always knew how much was left. If he suspected any was missing his eyes got small and fixed and he complained to Eva about it.  Sammy and Agnes hardly ever ate any of it because they knew he would be grumpy, and besides, they knew what it was like to come home looking forward to something that wasn’t there anymore. Nick loved coffee, too, but not the drinking kind. He kept gobs of coffee ice cream in the freezer, coffee yogurt in the fridge, and coffee nibs in the kitchen cupboard, and no one was allowed to touch any of those, either.

   They had breakfast together more often than their father-less dinners. But before they were allowed to eat Nick passed out piles of vitamins. They would push the pills into order and then sit looking at them while he drank apple cider vinegar from one glass and black strap molasses from another. The first one down the gullet was vitamin A, then vitamin E, while the worst ones they saved for last. Lecithin was a horse pill. Agnes hated it. The yeast, kelp, and liver she swallowed fast, the narky flavors sliding over her tongue. Zinc and garlic were bad later in the day because she couldn’t help burping them up. The desiccated liver was not the worst. The worst was the huge tablespoon of pale-yellow cod liver oil they had to swallow. Their mother secretly slipped drops of lemon into it so they wouldn’t throw up.

   Eva had to get on Nick’s vitamin bandwagon, too, but she got a Wheateena Juicer to grease the wheels. She told Nick she couldn’t get the pills down and needed smoothies. She told Sammy and Agnes the machine digested everything ahead of time and all they had to do was drink it. She squeezed oranges, and added apples, beets, and wheatgrass. Sometimes she would halve carrots on the long side and slide them down the chute into the auger, but then Agnes drank the juice holding her nose since she hated carrots.

   One of the last times she ever ate cooked carrots was when she had a mess of them in her mouth at dinner but wouldn’t swallow them. She had had enough. She felt like she was going to gag and choke. Eva got mad when she saw Agnes’s mouth at a standstill and made her stand in the corner. She still wouldn’t swallow, until Eva finally let her spit the orange paste into her hands, and then clean up at the kitchen sink.

   The only thing worse was koseliena, which their grandmother served every time the few times they went to their house. Eva’s parents had disowned her for marrying a man not Lithuanian and ten years her senior. The no-go rules had since been relaxed. Koseliena is chopped organ meat set in cold gelatin with horse radish on the side. Agnes always said, “I don’t want to try it.” She always had to stare down a slice of it, threatening to throw up.

   “You should eat your vegetables,” Eva said. “They’re good for you, for your eyes.” Agnes’s eyes were going bad. They were going out of focus, like a screwed-up telescope. She needed glasses. “Carrots aren’t vegetables, they’re roots,” she retorted. “I don’t care about seeing in the dark, why should I care, it’s still dark, there’s nothing to see, and I just really hate carrots.” Eva gave her the belt after that. Nick never hit the children. It was always Eva who did the hitting. She never said wait until your father gets home since they would have said, “Who?”

   Eva got married because her three sisters slept in the second bedroom while she slept on a daybed in a no-bedroom, because her mother was always bossing her around, and because she was a free spirit. She got married the day she was one minute older than eighteen. She immediately loved sleeping in her own bed in her own room in her own house.

   Nick was always busy selling ball bearings and hitting golf balls so that they only ever went on two family vacations. Eva once took Agnes to Dainava, a Lithuanian summer camp, but it wasn’t meant to be. Eva’s older sister was a bigwig in the community and had the blood of their parents in her veins. She was a bigwig at the camp, too.

   Eva drove her Mercedes to the summer camp, the top down, laughing and singing, Agnes’s bags tossed into the trunk. It was in Michigan, farmland all around, outside a small town, which is Manchester. The summer camp had been there since the early 1960s when the American Lithuanian Catholic Federation bought 200-some acres for it. They wouldn’t let her stay, though, because Agnes didn’t speak Lithuanian. She felt very alone walking back to the car. Eva knew for sure her older sister’s hand was behind it. She spun gravel turning around. She was so mad she got two speeding tickets going home, one in Michigan and one in Ohio. They never went back to the camp.

   Before they went to Fredericksburg on their second vacation, they went to Niagara Falls with Bob Bliss, Nick’s golf buddy who they had never seen before, and his wife and their little girl. Eva asked Nick to put them up on the Canadian side so they could walk in Queen Victoria Park and Table Rock Point on top of the waterfall. But he wanted to play golf on the American side, so they stayed in New York at a roadside motel with a pool out front.  

   Agnes had gotten a new bathing suit for the vacation, a blue cotton gingham pinafore with elasticized puffy bottoms. Friday morning after breakfast Nick and Bob went golfing and they went to the pool. Sammy played with something he was inventing. Eva sat on the lip of the pool with her legs scissoring and watching Agnes paddle back and forth.  

   The bottom of the pool was robin egg blue and the sun felt like a fuzzy electric blanket. By the time she saw the black bug floating on the water in front of her it was too late. She skimmed over it and felt it get under her bib and bite her on the stomach. It stung like crushed red peppers. Eva helped her out of the water and laid her down on the scratchy concrete and they watched a red welt rise on her stomach. 

   “I don’t like looking at sores,” the little Bliss girl said looking down at Agnes.

   Sammy and Agnes were dying to go to Ripley’s Believe It or Not across the bridge in Canada. They begged their father to take them to the odditorium. In the travel brochure it looked like a fallen over Empire State Building with King Kong on the side of it. But he went golfing again the next day and they had to go bowling. She was only seven, but Eva found pint-sized black bowling shoes for her, and a blue marbleized ball she could push at the pins. After twenty minutes Agnes felt like her arm was going to fall off. 

   “One thing about bowling that’s better than golf is you never lose a bowling ball,” Bob Bliss guffawed.  

   They had dinner that night at Michael’s Italian Restaurant. Eva and Nick had liver and onions and they ate all the American cheese and salami from the antipasto plate, and the chicken fingers, hot dogs, and French fries, too, except for the slices of them Sammy tested for floatability in his glass of Sprite. Agnes didn’t drink soda, but Eva let Sammy have it because he liked the lime flavor.

   “Taste its tingling tartness,” he said, slurping it up his straw.

   The next morning Eva put out a bread pan of congealed scrapple she had brought with her, slicing it into squares, and frying it on the hot plate in their room.  She made it from pork scraps, everything but the oink, she said, with cornmeal, and spices. Nick called Eva’s scrapple pon haus. It was a salty meat cracker. “Shoofly pie and apple pandowdy,” he sang, standing next to Eva as she mixed in scrambled eggs and ketchup. “Makes your eyes light up, your tummy say howdy, makes the sun come out, when heavens are cloudy.”

   Perched on the top deck of the Maid of the Mist later that afternoon they set sail for the Horseshoe Falls. Sammy and Agnes hung on the rail at the front of the boat, their faces wet in the swell and noise. Agnes thought about Moe singing his Niagara Falls song in the Three Stooges movies Sammy and she watched Saturday mornings.“Slowly I turn, step by step, inch by inch,” Moe purred, leaning away from Larry, looking sideways at Curly, his eyes slits of mischief and mayhem.

   Everybody on the boat was wearing a blue rain poncho just like everybody else. Even though it was a sunny day they were being rained on. When the boat ricocheted turning in the turmoil at the base of the falls, Agnes mixed up Mrs. Bliss and Eva, grabbing the wrong hand, Eva snatching at her other hand. She was pulled up on her toes between the two women.

   Eva had learned to sink or swim when her father took her out on Lake Erie in his rowboat and threw her into the water. But Agnes’s family didn’t have a boat, so she didn’t know how to swim, only paddle like a dog. Eva never taught her, since she was scared to death of open water,  and Nick was too busy to take her to the city pool.

   After the Maid of the Mist docked, Nick picked them up, they stopped at HoJo’s for a dinner of beans and sweet brown bread, and then drove straight home, the sun sinking into the twilight ahead of them. While Sammy napped with his head lolling in her lap, Agnes inspected her leather moccasin change purse. She had gotten it from Marcia. The Shoshone Indians had sewed it. It was studded with green, red, and pink glass seed beads. Marcia, who was her best friend, always brought back souvenirs from her family vacations, the change purse from Yellowstone, a gold-trimmed Ghost Town cowboy hat from Lake George, and a “Don’t Mess with Texas” t-shirt from the Alamo. 

   Five years later coming home from Fredericksburg from their second family vacation, Agnes kept her eyes down while Sammy stared at his reflection in the back-door window. Their parents were at it again, cutting and slashing each other all the way home while Sammy and she fidgeted in the back seat.

   “I give you cash, so when I say don’t use the credit card, I mean don’t use the credit card,” Nick insisted.

   “But you don’t give me enough cash,” Eva told him.

   “That’s what I give you the credit card for,” he told her.

   “But you’re telling me not to use the credit card, to wait until you give me cash, which you don’t do,” she said.

   They argued and fought about money from Hagerstown to Youngstown  until they finally ran out of steam. Later, after nightfall and a gas station stop, Nick started up again. He laid down the law and insisted she promise to never use the credit card. He said she was ruining them by spending all the family money and their nest egg, too. “I’ll just charge it,” was one of Eva’s favorite things to say as she slid her Diner’s Club card out of her purse. Sammy and Agnes didn’t exactly know what it was all about and didn’t ask.

   “Doesn’t that sound weird to you?” Eva asked, twisting over the car seat towards her children. “He wants me to put food on the table, clothes on your back, and fill up the piggybank with money he never gives us. What do you think about that?” Nick said people were putting things into her head. Eva said she didn’t want her head to be empty as a coconut.

   Agnes stared at the change purse she had filled with pebbles from the Fredericksburg battlefields. The closer they got to home the more Eva and Nick argued. He said he brought home the bacon. She said he had bacon for brains. Every twenty-or-so miles he threatened to throw her out of the car. 

   “Get out of the car or I’ll throw you out” he yelled, mashing down on the gas pedal, even though they were already going faster than all the other cars. But he didn’t throw her out. When they got home, he slept on the sofa downstairs for a week until they made up, but they were never the same again

   Eva started taking classes downtown when Agnes was eight years old. Nick didn’t want her going to Cleveland State University. He didn’t want her going downtown, either, where the school was, even though he worked close to there and ate lunch at the Theatrical on Short Vincent every day.

   “I don’t like you going downtown,” he said, putting his foot down.

   “What about you?” Eva asked, stamping her foot.

   Eva and Agnes went downtown every week, Tuesdays and Thursdays for Agnes’s ballet lessons, and Wednesdays for white gloves and party manners classes at Higbee’s. Sometimes they stopped at the Hippodrome, where there was a movie house, and said hello to Vince. He had an office next to the poolroom in the basement. Eva explained he was the man in charge. He wore a brown suit and always gave them something to drink, ice water for Agnes, and something in a fancy glass for Eva.

   Afterwards they stayed and saw a movie with the free tickets Vince gave them. They saw “Jaws” and “The Sting” and “Live and Let Die.” Agnes loved the big screen. She liked Roger Moore. She loved  Robert Redford. She was terrified of the shark.

   Nick and Eva loved each other once, but it had drained away. One night at dinner they got into a do-or-die argument. Eva bolted from the table and went upstairs. Nick followed her. Sammy and Agnes could hear them in their bedroom, screaming at each other in foreign languages. Suddenly there was a loud crash. Eva came running down and ran to Anna’s house. Nick came downstairs after she was gone and told them everything was all right. He sat by the back window the rest of the night and stared into the ravine.

   When they went upstairs, they looked into their parent’s bedroom and saw a hole in the wall. A potato masher was lying on the floor. They found out later he had thrown it at her but missed. It lay on the floor until the next day when Eva came home. She cleaned up the dinner table, did the dishes, and put the potato masher away. 

   Anna came over the next day when Nick was at work. Eva packed a suitcase and told them she would be gone for a few days. She took them into the kitchen and showed them the food she had prepared in casserole dishes and explained how to heat it up. Agnes had a hollow leg in those days and could eat as much as she wanted and never gain weight.

   “I’ll be back Monday,” Eva said.

   But she didn’t come back Monday, or the rest of the next week. She finally came back two weeks later, on a Tuesday, just after Agnes had gotten home from school.

   “Mom, we’re almost out of food,” she said.

   They found out she wasn’t coming back when she took them to Helen Hutchley’s for ice cream. They sat in a booth in the back. Agnes had strawberry swirl on a plate, Sammy had tin roof in a cone, and Eva had two scoops of butterscotch in a cup. She told them things weren’t going good at home, which they knew, and then she said she was leaving Nick for good and moving downtown. 

   “How can you do that to him?” Agnes asked, even though she didn’t like her father as much as she did her mother, who she loved more than anything. Sammy put his cone of tin roof down on a napkin and wrapped his short arms around his mother.

   “Whatever you want to do, mom, whatever you think is best,” he said. But Agnes was mad and started to cry. “Finish your ice cream, peanut,” Eva said, so she did, before it melted.

   Sammy and Agnes lived with Nick for a year after Eva left, but afterwards moved in with her. It had been hard at home. Agnes had never done anything when the family was together. Eva had done everything, so it was an undertaking for Agnes to do anything. She tried cleaning and cooking but it was a rough go. She couldn’t keep up at school. Sometimes she sat inside her closet in the middle of the day, hiding. She was bitter that her father never helped her, either. He was always gone, no matter what happened.

   After they moved away, and moved into a new downtown apartment building, which was the Park Centre on Superior Ave., she only ever had to help her mother dry the dishes. It was Sammy and Agnes and Eva, the Three Musketeers again. Nick had never exactly been one of the Musketeers. He was never going to be one. He had lost his chance.

   Agnes got a second chance. She did better in her new school. She made new friends. She didn’t sit in closets anymore, staring at nothing in the dark. She sat on their 17^th floor balcony and looked at the far horizon on the other side of Lake Erie. It was where she could see stars blink on at night. She counted her lucky stars.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A once upon a crime whodunit.” Barron Cannon, Adventure Books

“Captures the vibe of 1950s NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available from Amazon

Late summer and early autumn. New York City. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye. The 1956 World Series. President Eisenhower at the opening game. An assassin in the dugout.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication