By Ed Staskus

   Maggie Campbell was a Bay Brat, which means she grew up in Bay Village, Ohio, where the well-off live west of Cleveland, while the not so-well-off live back east in Cleveland. She lived there her whole life growing up. When she was a girl, she picked up every lost bird and squirrel, every lost cat and dog, and every injured anything still alive and brought it home to protect it.

   She was an animal lover from the get-go. She got it partly when she was born, in the blood, partly from her dad, Fred, but not from her mom. Alma never liked any of the animals they ever had in the house basement garage backyard.

   Her parents met at Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, a few hours from Philadelphia. Her grandparents on her dad’s side had moved from Ohio to Philadelphia a few years earlier and enrolled in college there after high school. Alma was working in the town library, which is how they met. He fell head over heels for her, swept her off her feet, or at least he thought so, and they got married.    

   “We’re out of here,” is what he said the minute they got married. They moved right back to Cleveland. Even though they were married for more than forty years it might have been the worst thing either of them ever did. But Fred was stubborn, and Alma could be mean as a junkyard dog.

   Maggie had a mom who didn’t love her dad, and a dad who was frustrated about it, and the way he tried to make his wife happy was to rough up their kids. So, it was a tough childhood. Either you were being totally ignored or you were being roughed up.

   There were four of them. First, there was Elaine, then two years later Maggie, and then Bonnie hard on her heels, and last, three years later, Brad. Alma always said Fred tricked her four times. He zipped it up and from then on kept his thoughts to himself.

   He was from Cleveland, from the west side, where he grew up almost rich for his time. Alma was from Jersey Shore, just a few miles from Williamsport, where she grew up poor. Jersey Shore isn’t anywhere near New Jersey, the Jersey shoreline, and the shoreline it had didn’t live up to the name. There used to be silk mills and cigar factories in Jersey Shore. Later, factories made steel rails for train tracks there.

   During the Depression Maggie’s paternal grandfather was the only teenager in his high school who had a car. He used to follow her grandmother down the street trying to get her to come in his car with him, saying he wanted to help carry her books, so along the way what happened was they got cozy and got married.

   Her grandfather in Jersey Shore had three jobs the minute he stopped being a teenager. He was a coal miner, a school bus driver, and a milkman, but his family still stayed in the dumps. They were too poor to paint but too proud to whitewash. Even though they were always short they built their own house on the Susquehanna River. Maggie didn’t know how they got it built since they were strapped for hard cash most of the time.

   The river was their front yard. Susquehanna means Oyster River and it was on the Susquehanna where the Mormons say they got their holy orders delivered to them by divine beings. It was a big comfortable house. It’s still standing, although it’s not been taken care of, so it’s falling apart fast.

   Her grandmother lived in the house into her 80s, but then sold it and moved into a trailer, in a trailer park in the mountains above Jersey Shore. She started believing people in the other trailers were trying to shoot her with laser guns. She slept wrapped up in foam rubber holding an umbrella over her head for protection. Alma never wanted to talk about her mom because she thought she was crazy, and a Jesus freak to boot.

   Maggie didn’t know her Jersey Shore grandfather. He died young. He had arthritis from tip to toe, and it finished him off. It didn’t help working underground coal mining. She knew her grandmother well enough. Whenever her sisters and she visited her, she taught them how to pull taffy and fudge. They played with her paper dolls. She didn’t have any real dolls. They sat on the front porch in the afternoon and waited for the bean truck.

   “Before dinnertime she sent my older sisters to the side of the road. When the bean truck, or sometimes the vegetable truck, went by on the unpaved road beans bounced off the back of it and they would run and gather them up. My grandmother cooked them for dinner. If no beans fell off the truck, there was no dinner, although she usually had a little something else in the house.” Most of the time it was something cold she had canned months earlier.

   Fred went to Upper Darby High School, starting when he was a sophomore. His parents moved him to Philadelphia from Cleveland, and he never stopped saying he hated it. He was a Cleveland Browns fan and wore their colors, so he got into fights every day with the other kids who were Philadelphia Eagles fans.

   “My dad liked telling us stories when we were growing up, like the one about how one day he and his friends went to the second story of their high school and jumped up and down all at once all together until the second floor fell in on the first floor.” The school’s mascot is a lion, but when Fred was there it was a court jester.

   Fred’s parents were from Akron and lived in Lakewood for a long time. They had to move when the new I-90 highway was being built. It was called the “Main Street of Northern Ohio.” When they were growing up Fred would drive them to a bridge over the highway and show them the exact spot below the bridge where their house used to be.

   It was when they had to sell the house to the state that they moved to Philadelphia. After Fred and Alma came back, they lived in Lakewood in a rented house for a few years. Maggie’s sister Elaine was born there. The rest of them made the scene in Bay Village. The family had moved to a short cul-de-sac, five blocks south of Lake Erie. Her dad designed the house, and it was built just the way he wanted it. He died when she was thirty-three years old. The next thing she did was get married to Steve de Luca.

   The crow’s nest was where Maggie grew close to Brad, who when he was small fry looked just like Bamm Bamm in the Flintstones cartoons. They even called him Bamm Bamm, although after he got his drum set, they called him Boom Boom. Brad brought home a drum set somebody had thrown out on their tree lawn and set it up in the basement. He taught himself how to play. He called himself Ginger Boom after Ginger Baker, his favorite drummer. He had thrown down the gauntlet. After he did no animal nor human would go down to the basement. It was too noisy, to begin with, and damp as his underarms, besides.

   They all had our own rooms, although Brad and Maggie shared a room because the house was a room short. Her sisters had separate bedrooms down the half-story stairway from them, and her parents were at the other end of the hallway. They lived in the crow’s nest until Elaine moved out and got married and Maggie finally got her own room.

   Maggie was Brad’s number one protector when he was growing up, like she was with all the neighborhood’s lost cats and dogs. She and Brad sold bananas, bread and butter sandwiches, and hard-boiled eggs on their front lawn whenever their mom wasn’t looking. They ran to Bracken Way with money in their hands when they heard Uncle Marty’s Ice Cream truck coming.

   But Maggie could never protect Brad from Coco, their poodle, who bit and tore his diapers off when he was little. He could never crawl away fast enough, no matter how fast he scurried on his hands and knees. The dog was quick as the devil and cut him off.

   Sometimes Maggie didn’t try to stop Coco, even if she could have. She had some of her mom’s tough love in her. Other times Brad had done something she didn’t like, and it was just his tough luck that Coco was on the rampage. She could be a brat when she had to be.

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.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A Cold War thriller that captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

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

Late summer, New York City, 1956. The Mob on the make and the streets full of menace. President Eisenhower on his way to Brooklyn for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. Stan Riddman, a private eye working out of Hell’s Kitchen, scares up the shadows looking for a straight answer.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

By Ed Staskus

   Maggie Campbell grew up in Bay Village, ran around like a squirrel on her dead-end street and through nearby back yards, went to grade school and high school in Bay Village, got her first job at the Bay Pool, and didn’t know West Park existed until she moved away from home and got married. West Park is eight miles from Bay Village.

   At first there wasn’t anybody anywhere in West Park. The wilderness didn’t have a name. There were some Indians who came and went. At the turn of the 19^th century, it was lots of land, a handful of homes, and a few wagon paths. The paths were rutted and often impassable. The land was named for John West, an early pioneer.

   John West and his wife were from Ireland. They weren’t the founders of the new community, but they had a 600-acre farm with a 25-acre front yard and an artificial lake with rowboats on it. The land around the lake was called West Park. Over the years everybody came to call the entire locality the same thing.

   The terrain is bordered to the north by Lakewood, which is on the south shore of Lake Erie. It is west of Brooklyn and east of Fairview Park. Everything else is south of it. It is twelve and a half square miles formed as Rockport Hamlet in 1892, incorporated as Rockport Village in 1902, and finally renamed the Village of West Park in 1913. In the 1920s it was its own city with its own government. It became the last independent city to be annexed by Cleveland in 1923.

   George Reitz, who was the mayor at the time, said, “I’m no longer going to be mayor of West Park. I’m going to be a resident of Cleveland.” Cleveland was the fifth largest city in the country in thew 1920s.

   After Maggie and Steve de Luca got married, they moved in with Steve’s brother Fat Freddie in Little Italy, but it got off to a bad start and went downhill. Fat Freddie had a heart of gold but a Red Skelton sense of humor that got on Maggie’s nerves. It wasn’t long before she wanted to do him in. She might have but for Fat Freddie being friends with the pastor of Holy Rosary Church and the local mobsters. Besides, he was her brother-in-law and murdering him would have looked bad at the next family picnic.

   The first road in West Park was a wooden plank toll road. Horse drawn streetcars went back and forth. All the other roads were unimproved, a mess of mud every spring and buried by snow every winter. Oswald Kamm opened a grocery store at the intersection of what is now Lorain Ave. and Rocky River Dr. Most people called West Park the “lost city.” Getting to the grocery store was an ordeal. Whenever a thunderstorm broke out everybody stabled their horses at the store and stayed the night.

   There are four West Park neighborhoods, which are Kamm’s Corners, Riverside, Bellaire-Puritas, and Jefferson. Kamm’s Corners is Irish Catholic. There are taverns right and left of the corner. Riverside was largely unsettled until Cleveland Hopkins Airport was built there in 1925, when it became airplane country. Bellaire-Puritas is manufacturing intensive, largely due to the presence of many industrial parks. It is adjacent to highways and has access to the Norfolk-Southern and CSX rail lines. Jefferson was thinly populated for a long time but following annexation residential development moved forward. Grayton Rd. is north of the airport and more-or-less follows the lay of the Rocky River. Alan Apelt grew up on Grayton Rd. when it was a dirt road and everything around it was farmland. 

   “If a car was driving down our road we knew they were lost,” Alan said. His grandfather August farmed vegetables there in the 1920s. After he passed away one of his four children took over the family farm. Rudy Apelt built a greenhouse while still farming outdoors. In the 1950s Cleveland was known as the “Greenhouse Capital of the Americas.” Through the 1960s there were more than fifty of them around town growing cucumbers, tomatoes, and leaf lettuce. It was where the Central and West Side Markets got their produce.

   After Rudy met his maker Alan and his brother Ron took the helm. They specialized in English seedless cucumbers. When his brother passed away Alan turned the greenhouses into a hydroponic operation. He gave it up in 2016 and dismantled them. In their place he planted 400 Chinese Chestnut trees.

   “Chestnut trees are the easiest things to manage on a day-to-day basis by yourself,” he said.

Three years later he had a harvest to meet the rising trend in cooking of using chestnuts. They have a sweet flavor and potato-like consistency. When they fall from their branches, they are enclosed in spiney burrs. Picking them up means wearing gloves. Picking them up barehanded means getting stabbed by a spiny burr.

   John West’s red brick house still stood on W. 138th Street when Maggie and her husband bought a house on West Ave. in the Jefferson neighborhood. John Marshall School of Engineering was at one end of the street and Cleveland Police First District headquarters was at the other end. Steve’s father had been a lawyer for the Cleveland Mob. Steve was ambivalent about law and order being close to hand.

   There weren’t any farms left. All the greenhouses were gone. Three interstates were nearby. There were three rail transit stops within hiking biking distance. Almost everybody was Irish, Latino, or Black. Maggie was Scottish, which was close enough. Steve was Italian, which wasn’t close, at all. But he had been born and bred in Little Italy, where the Dago’s were surrounded by Wasps and Jews. He knew how to mix it up with folks who were nothing like him.

   If things got sketchy, being from Little Italy, he knew how to take care of himself. If they got dangerous, he knew who to call. If Fat Freddie proved to be not enough back-up, he knew his brother knew enough dangerous men to set things right. In the event, their home was their castle. Just in case, they always had two or three dogs in the house. They weren’t Chihuahuas or Miniature Poodles, either.

   “A good dog makes good neighbors,” Maggie always said.

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.”

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

“A police procedural when the Rust Belt was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F1LM1WF9/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2MYAQAOZIC2U9&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hTm7BGbiQbSe5ZapFwYPPfcwOpTe-Vdg6VLE4aGyTyk.Z0R-VNBWWEcvKcNaO9LdCOUnNIOOXgvYkRS_FXiXuHk&dib_tag=se&keywords=bomb+city+ed+status&qid=1742136726&sprefix=bomb+city+ed+staskus%2Caps%2C84&sr=8-1

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. Revenge is always personal. It gets personal.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

By Ed Staskus

   Before Maggie Campbell’s husband Steve de Luca stopped blazing, he turned the younger of their two cats, whose name was Mittens, into a deadhead. They started calling him Stones because when the cat and Steve were in the bedroom together smoking weed, the way it worked was, whenever Steve exhaled the cat inhaled.

   Mittens adopted a rallying cry along with his new name. The rallying cry was, “Work is the curse of the smoking class.” Steve finally reminded him he had never worked a day in his life and to drop the catchphrase.

   He would lean up on his haunches and sniff for the smoke. He was a candy-colored longhair. The look Stones gave Maggie, whenever she caught them together, was the “Are you looking at me?” look. He thought he was a hepcat. Afterwards, after Steve gave up drugs, they changed his name back to Mittens and he went back to abusing catnip.

  They called Sebastian, their older cat, Big Blackie, until he got even bigger. He had his own take on life. He did backflips when he was a kitten. He ran into the backyard whenever he could and hunted, at least when he was young. Later, in middle age, he spent most of his time in the basement eating. Eating non-stop didn’t work out too well for him. As he got older, everybody started calling him Fatbastian. He didn’t seem to mind the moniker. He kept eating and getting bigger.

   Steve’s father wasn’t a gangster, but his father’s friends and his uncles and their friends were all gangsters. His father was an attorney for the Italian Mob. He was the lawyer for the hired gun who killed the Mob’s enemy Danny Greene with a car bomb in Lyndhurst. But, at the same time, he had been a good friend of the Irishman for many years. Their house in Little Italy was a gift from Danny Greene and the Celtic Club. He never told the Italians about that. It was a secret.

   Steve’s family had wads of money when he was growing up. Whenever he smashed up a car his dad had a new one for him the next day. Speeding tickets got taken care of. There was no need to slow down. Steve was using at eleven and selling at thirteen. His uncles were addicts and used to run and hide their stashes from the police under his bed. When Steve was older, he ran errands for his father. When his father was on the verge of going to jail once when he wouldn’t give something up to a judge, he told Steve he absolutely needed him to go to Columbus that day.

   “These papers must be in the state court system by 5 o’clock. Make sure you get there.”

   Steve sped down to Columbus, delivered the papers, and proceeded to get tequila trashed, to the degree he was swinging at and spitting at policemen who had been called to get him out of the bar he was making a mess of. He became a Steve-o-mess wobbling in mid-air when they got done with him.

   They finally hauled him outside and slapped cuffs on him. They pushed him into the back of a squad car. They allowed him one phone call. He called his father.

   “I’m in jail,” he said.

   “I have one question for you.”

   “What?”

   “Did you deliver the papers?”

   “Yeah.”

   “OK, sit tight, you’ll be out in one hour.”

   He was out in fifty-five minutes.

   Steve’s brother, Freddie, had a used car lot on Carnegie Ave. on the east side of Cleveland. Freddie was the boss and Steve was the workforce. Little Italy was a short walk south of University Circle, where bluebloods went to Case Western Reserve University and where all the museums were. The ghetto was a short walk north of University Circle. That’s where Steve and his brother got started rescuing dogs. Mean-spirited pet owners dumped animals in that neighborhood, behind abandoned houses and shuttered warehouses. 

   They found dogs on the street, picked them up, and brought them back to the car lot. They took care of them and tried to find them homes. Once his brother and he were looking at somebody’s old car for sale and saw a mistreated dog chained to a tree in the back yard. He was on his last legs, with barely a leg to stand on.

   “What’s with the dog?” asked Steve, keeping his eyes on the old car man whose dog it was.

   “Oh, he’s a bad dog, got to keep him tied up,” said the man.

   Steve looked at the dog. He looked at the man and then at the dog again. He didn’t see any badness in the dog. He saw plenty of misery.

   “I’ll tell you what, mister,” he said. “You keep your car, and we’ll take the dog. To make it an even trade we won’t say anything to anybody about you abusing animals.” 

   “No sir, you can’t have that dog.”

   Freddie put his right hand in his pocket and kept it there. He weas wearing a Chief Wahoo baseball cap. He always carried a handgun. The man looked at the pocket. “Oh, hell, just take it,” he sputtered.

   They untied the dog and took it with them.

   There was a pack of wild dogs living in a wooded field behind their car lot. Freddie and Steve put bowls of food out at the tree line for them. They didn’t like going too far into the woods. One day Steve heard howling, so he went into the gloom. He found a blind dog whose litter of puppies had been mauled and some of them eaten by other dogs.

   “Dogs will eat other dogs if they’re that hungry,” Maggie said. “They will. They’ll eat anything.”

   Steve grabbed the puppies that were still alive and ran. The blind dog howled for three days in the woods. There was nothing anybody could do. When the dog stopped howling everybody knew what had happened.

   Steve’s father died the same year Maggie’s father died. Afterwards, Steve was living with Freddie when he met Maggie, his wife-to-be. It was rocky at first, but they smoothed it out. After they got married, they shared the house with Steve’s older brother for almost a year, until Maggie couldn’t take it anymore.

   “He loves us living here because I grocery shop, cook, and clean. I am a clean freak. My vacuum never gets put away. That’s how much I love to vacuum. I don’t screw around.”

   Freddie and Steve had the same eyes, although Freddie was shorter and thicker than Steve, had curly hair, and was a deviler. Maggie had OCD, putting her at odds with all devilers. “Everybody knows you don’t screw around with someone who has OCD,” she said. “You just don’t do that! Except for Freddie, who thinks it’s funny to mess with me, even though I always get mad. That fool doesn’t seem to care.”

   There was no good place to do her make-up in the Little Italy house. The rooms were weirdly partitioned and there wasn’t any good lighting, so she had to do it downstairs. “I keep my make-up bag there. Your brother stuffs banana peels and old food wrappers into my bag when I’m sleeping. Do you know how dirty and disgusting that is?”

   Freddie would just laugh. He thought he was funny, although he wasn’t. His funny bone was bent the wrong way. But Maggie didn’t cry. It took everything she had to not punch him in the face. Her father was somebody who had always said, “Someone’s pissed you off? Go beat the hell out of them.”

   “You think you want to hit me?” Freddie would say. “Go ahead, try it, girlie, try it.”

   She got so upset that her fists balled up. More than anything else in the world she wanted to punch him in the face.

   “I’m not going to lower myself to who you are,” she said. “I’m not going to do it. I’m still a good person.”

   Freddie wasn’t all bad, though. In the morning he’d say to Maggie, “Pack some extra lunch meat for if we find a dog on the streets today.” She would pack their lunches, for them and anything that needed a square meal. If man’s best friend was in bad shape and had to be rescued, and when he barked saying something like, “You better cut that hunk of baloney into more pieces because I’m hungry enough to eat six of them,” they always had something in their Glad bags to offer the animal.

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

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

“A thriller in the Maritimes, magic realism, a double cross, and a memory.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CV9MRG55

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Two hired guns from Montreal. A peace officer working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

By Ed Staskus

   It was in the middle of winter that Maggie Campbell started noticing her mother wasn’t herself. The middle of winter meant it was dark as could be before six o’clock. A blizzard had blown in over Lake Erie. It was icy cold and the forecast was for more cold.

   “Something’s wrong with mom,” Magie told her brother Brad.

   “What do you mean?” he asked. 

   “Something’s up, maybe she’s in another drug psychosis, because she’s got issues.”

   Steve de Luca, Maggie’s husband, and she had gone to Fort Lauderdale with her mother and Pete, her stepdad, to their house there. Alma got into a health problem and got put on steroids. They wreaked havoc with her. One thing led to another and she started overdoing and overdosing everything. It wasn’t exactly anything new, but she went into a psychosis. They got her out of the hospital in Florida and went back to Ohio. When they did they had to detox her.

   “Mom, you have to go back into care,” Maggie told her getting off the plane in Cleveland. “You have got to get clean.”

   “I’m not going back to the hospital, Jay,” she said. Her mother called Maggie the Jay Bird.

   “Yes, you are. You’re not done. There’s something seriously wrong. You have to go back and finish.”

   “If you think I’m going back to the hospital, you’re wrong, I’m not. I’m healthy as a horse.”

   When Maggie insisted, she got mad as a hornet and called her daughter everything but a cannibal. “I hope you’re having fun!”

   “If you think this is fun for me, you are seriously mistaken,” Maggie said. 

   “Go to hell, Jay,” she said.

   “Maybe later, mom, but right now, I’ve got to get you to a hospital.” 

   Even though Alma was angry up down and every which way, they got her there. Afterwards things got better, even though she wasn’t sleeping well at night. She tossed and turned and woke up exhausted. Then she fell and broke her back. Maggie told her she needed surgery. 

   “I don’t want to,” Alma said. “I’m going to go on pain management instead.”

   “Oh, great,” Maggie said to her brother. “She’s going to take more drugs.” Alma’s house was already a pharmacy. The whole family knew about it but nobody was willing to do anything about it.

   After a week of intense pain management Alma couldn’t walk. She had to have surgery because of the way her vertebra broke. It was poking into a nerve. After surgery she seemed better, but she was high all the time, even more than she had been. She would take an OxyContin and then a couple of Percocet’s and be gone like a kite in the sky. Maggie’s mother was 78 years-old and was tripping. It wasn’t anything new. She had taken drugs most of her life. It started when she became a nurse. After that it was going to the doctor, getting drugs, then seeing more doctors, and getting more drugs.

   Maggie began noticing that after her mother started getting better she started getting worse. At first, they thought she had a urinary tract infection, as though it was one thing after another. They thought she was looking, sounding, and acting crazy because of the infection. But the doctor ruled out a urinary tract infection.

   “I just have the flu,” Alma said.

   “Maybe it’s about missing her drugs,” Pete said. “She hasn’t taken any medication in three weeks.”

   “What? Why isn’t she taking her drugs?” Maggie asked. “She’s a major hypochondriac. I mean, she lives to take drugs.” All of a sudden, a woman who lived to take drugs wouldn’t take a single pill. She wouldn’t take her high blood pressure medicine, her thyroid medicine, or her asthma medicine. She had gone cold turkey.

   “You have to take these,” Maggie said.

   “I was a nurse,” Alma said. “You’re not a nurse, What do you know?”

   “Take your medicine.”

   “No.”

   On top of everything else Alma was diabetic and wouldn’t take her insulin. “Don’t you think it’s time to measure her sugar?” Pete asked Maggie.

   “She doesn’t seem to have any idea about what to do to take care of herself,” Maggie said. “It’s like she doesn’t know anymore that she needs insulin.”

   They took her back to the doctor’s office. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He said she might have had some mini strokes, which he was going to have to test for. When they finally got her to take her medications, she would only take them from Maggie. She had to put them in applesauce and feed them to Alma in the mush. She wouldn’t take any from her son Brad. He was like their father and that made Alma mad. She never liked her first husband Fred.

   “Do you want supper, mom?” Maggie asked.

   “’No, I already ate some.”

   “That’s what she says, even though she hasn’t,” Maggie told Pete. “You have to live in her world. There’s no reasoning with her. You have to take all reasoning out of the conversation. Suppose she wants to have her hair brushed? You learn to use little white lies and trade-offs. ‘You take your medicine, mom, and I’ll brush your hair.’ It’s hard to watch. It’s like seeing your mom revert back to childhood.” 

   Maggie started doing art projects with Alma, just to keep her mind occupied.

   “My brother helps a little, but my stepdad and I are who take care of her,” Maggie told Steve. “My sister Bonnie, who hasn’t talked to me in more than seven years, lives in a podunk somewhere. No one even knows the name of the town. My other sister, Elaine, has a hard time with it. It makes her depressed, even though she and my mom never got along. She can’t deal with it and just stays away.”

   Maggie went to her mother’s house on Mondays and Fridays. She gave her a bath every Monday. Fridays were usually a bad day all around, as though everything might come to an end at the end of the week. Home health care came in five days a week and made sure she took her medications. They wrote everything they did down in an iPad.

   “She’ll take pills from me, and sometimes from a stranger, although not always. One Thursday she slept for more than fourteen hours and when Friday morning got there still didn’t want to get up.”

   “I don’t want to,” Alma said.

   “But why, mom?”

   “I don’t know.”

   “I don’t want to make you upset, but Tiffany’s going to be here soon to give you your medicine. Do you remember Tiffany?”

   “I don’t forget, Jay. The doctor says I never forget. I was just there, so I know.”

   “OK, so that’s what he said?”

   “He says I don’t have a memory problem at all.”

   “Mom, that’s great,” Maggie said. “I’m glad you don’t have a memory problem,”

   “That nurse, whoever she is, she can come here, but I won’t get out of bed.”

   “I can guarantee you she will be here, so you be nice.”

   “Oh, I’m nice. I’m just not going to get up.”

   “That’s not being nice.”

   “I know what’s chirpy and what’s not.”

   There were many things Alma no longer knew. There were some things she knew full well but there were fewer and fewer of them. What she still knew was slowly becoming a pile of broken mirrors.

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. 

Help support these stories. $25 a year (7 cents a day). Contact edwardstaskus@gmail.com for details.

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

“A Rust Belt police procedural when Cleveland was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F1LM1WF9/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2MYAQAOZIC2U9&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hTm7BGbiQbSe5ZapFwYPPfcwOpTe-Vdg6VLE4aGyTyk.Z0R-VNBWWEcvKcNaO9LdCOUnNIOOXgvYkRS_FXiXuHk&dib_tag=se&keywords=bomb+city+ed+status&qid=1742136726&sprefix=bomb+city+ed+staskus%2Caps%2C84&sr=8-1

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. Nothing goes according to plan.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

By Ed Staskus

   Every time Maggie Campbell found an animal, a cat, dog, bird, or squirrel, anything, it didn’t matter, she would take care of it. If they were hurt, her dad, Fred, and she would help them get better They did it together. If it was an emergency, they took them to the Lake Erie Nature Center down Wolf Rd. way.

   It drove her mother Alma batty. She barely tolerated animals. “They belong outside where they belong.” Besides, she had asthma. Their dander, saliva, and skin flakes aggravated it. It was a headache for everybody. “Somebody’s going to have to take me to the people doctor,” she complained bitterly whenever Maggie brought another lost or hurt critter home.

  “If you’re born to love animals, then you love animals,” Maggie said. She didn’t think it was anything you could just make happen. Her dad had it. She had it. Her mom wasn’t good with strays. She didn’t have it. Whenever Maggie wanted a pet, she always asked her dad. She never asked her mom. They had cats, dogs, guinea pigs, and a poodle, thanks to Fred.

   Their poodle Coco hated Maggie’s brother Brad. She never knew why, exactly, except she thought he might have been too rough with her when he was a crawler. “Coco, get him,” was all she had to say if they were sitting on the sofa together. Coco would jump him, growling and snapping and ripping off his diaper. She had fun making the poodle attack her little brother, since she knew the dog wanted to, and because she could.

  Before Elaine her older sister moved out, Maggie and Brad slept in the same room. They both had single beds with posts and a bar across the back. They each had cherry wood dressers, a closet, and shelves for their toys. Maggie slept by the window and Brad slept closer to the door. Her brother passed wind, more like gusts of noxious gas, when he was a young. They kept their bedroom window cracked open even in winter. Sometimes Brad farted so loud he woke her up.

   “Are your butt cheeks still flapping from that one?” 

  She did love him, though. He was a good kid most of the time. When she was in junior high, she took him with her wherever she went. They had their moments, though. They were like Tom and Jerry. No harm no foul.

   Maggie played TRIP! with him all the time when he was small. Wherever he was in the house, which was a split level, six steps up from the basement, or the five steps up to the kitchen, or the twelve steps up to the bedrooms, it didn’t matter. He never knew when Maggie was going to suddenly pull a cord tight and make him trip.

   Her sisters made her play LET ME HAVE IT! with them. They would be in Elaine or Bonnie’s bedroom, and she would have to say, “LET ME HAVE IT!” They would pummel her with pillows. Just beat her, letting her have it. It was pillow talk time.

  A car hit Coco when Maggie was a sophomore in high school. Coco had gotten older and slower, but none of them saw it coming. She ran up and down the street and into and out of the woods at the end of their cul-de-sac all her days.  The man who hit her stopped, picked her up, and went looking for the owners. When he found Bonnie, she came to the Bay Village swimming pool where Maggie was lifeguarding and got her. They had to put Coco down. Even Alma thought it was awful.

   When they got their Rottweiler, Alma claimed she loved the dog, but they still had to get rid of him because she said the dog inflamed her asthma. Her sister Elaine adopted him, since she had moved away from home, so Maggie was still able to see the dog whenever she wanted.

   Growing up in the Fred and Alma Campbell house in Bay Village was not like growing up in your average house. You were either going to move out while you were still young, or you were going to be thrown out. Looking back, after she left, she realized they all left early. Everybody in their family got married when they were 19, except Maggie. Her mom and dad got married at 19, her brother got married when he was 19, and both of her sisters got married when they were 19. She didn’t get married until I was 34, soon after her dad died. Still and all, she left the family home the year she was 19.

   Long before she got married, after her dad threw her out, she watched Elaine’s dog whenever her sister went on vacation. He was a sweet dog, but a stupid dog, too.  Elaine named him Candyman. Everybody called him Candy. He wasn’t the kind of vicious Rottweiler everybody thinks they are. He had a blanket he carried around. They called his blanket Betty. They would tell him to go get Betty and when he came back, he would be dragging his blankie behind him.

   He loved people, just loved them. Elaine lived in West Park, near St. Patrick’s, which was a Catholic church and school, and when school let out, the Candyman would sit at the front door whimpering to be let out.

   “You can’t go out,” Elaine would say. “You’re going to scare the kids.”

   He was muddle-headed and cried no matter what she said. He learned how to lean on the door and swivel the knob with his snoot and get out. Maggie started thinking he wasn’t so simpleminded, after all. “No, you’re not going out there,” she told him all the time whenever she was at Elaine’s house, but if she was upstairs, he would finesse the door and the next thing she knew he was at the end of the driveway. As the school kids walked by there was a big slurp for each of them. They walked away wiping their faces and rubbing their hands dry on their pants.

   He got out one day when two guys were playing with a frisbee in the street. The Rottie had seen them through the screen. He couldn’t contain himself. “You’re not going out there,” Maggie told him firmly, wagging her finger. “I don’t know those guys.” 

   He banged up against the door and when it flew open, he took off. The guys were 16, maybe 17, and when they saw him running full speed at them, they froze. Maggie ran out waving her arms. “Throw the frisbee!” she yelled. They stayed stuck in place stiff as sticks. “The dog will love you if you throw the damn frisbee!” One of them threw their bright red plastic disk. The eager beaver Rottweiler hauled ass after it.

   “Sweet,” one of the boys said.

   They hit the jackpot that day, running the dog until the end of the afternoon. His feet were raw when he got home. He was an idiot, after all, Maggie decided. She poured him a big bowl of clean cold water and rubbed aloe vera gel on his paw pads.

   Even though she loved animals, and her mom didn’t, which was something between them that wasn’t getting resolved anytime soon, Maggie was the only one of her mom’s four kids who was determined to spark some love in her mother. The others had long ago given up trying. They had their reasons.

   She would come home from parties or from dances when she was in junior high and plop down on her bed, sprawling out and telling Alma about the whole fantastic night, everything that happened. Her mom would stay on the bed with her, stroking her hand, listening. She cooed until Maggie fell asleep.

   A dog will love you if you throw a frisbee. In their family they had to plan scheme compel their mom to love them. It was just the way Alma was. Her father had grown up well-off, but not her mother. Maggie used to wonder what it was like for her growing up in a worn-out washed-up town, her family poor broken ignored. Her mother needed some love. Maggie could tell. Maybe animals couldn’t give it to her, but she could try to get it done.

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 Mid-Century Crime Thriller

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

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

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

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

By Ed Staskus

   Maggie Campbell was working at her friend’s hair salon in Old Brooklyn and was halfway through an overlay when her husband called. She couldn’t pick up since her hands were full. When she listened to the voice mail later, she heard Steve say he was sorry.

   “Honey, I’m sorry,” he said. She could hear talking in the background, and somebody laughing. The laughing man sounded like Fat Freddie, Steve’s brother.

   “What did you do?” she thought, sitting in the lunchroom, making a sandwich, waiting for it to heat up in the toaster oven. He rattled on for more than a minute. She took a bite of her ham and cheese sandwich. It was raining cats and dogs outside.

   “Oh, man, what did you do?” she thought to herself louder than before.

   “She was walking in the street,” he said. “She looked like she was trying to get hit by a car.”

   “Oh, he rescued another dog,” Maggie realized.

   He said the dog looked so bad that he pulled over, turned around, went back, and picked her up. Fat Freddie sat in the back with man’s best friend, who was shivering. “She was just looking for somebody to hit her,” Steve told Maggie over dinner that night. “She just wanted to die.” But there she was safe and sound at their feet.

   Steve found her on the east side, on Superior Ave. on the other side of downtown. No collar and no tags. She was a purebred German Shepherd, between two and three years old. Fat Freddie wanted her right away. He lived in Little Italy where he had some sketchy neighbors. But, because Steve’s brother had a hateful girlfriend, she said no, and that was that.

   When Steve brought her back to their house in West Park, Maggie fell in love with the pooch. “She’s so sweet I can’t stand it. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to give her to anybody.”

   She curled up on the sofa between them when they watched TV. If they got up at the same time, she didn’t know which one of them to follow. Wherever they went she was right behind them. She lay next to the claw tooth tub when Maggie took a bath. She had to step over the dog, which was hard to do with her short legs.

   She was wondering what the dog’s tale was.

   Maggie was going up the stairs to take a bath, stripping as she went, when she found out. She was taking her belt off when the dog almost pooped herself. She could not get away from the sight of the belt fast enough. The Shepherd stumbled down a few steps before recovering her balance, and disappeared fast

   Maggie muttered “son-of-a bitch” under her breath. “All because I took my belt off. How about that?”

   When they first got her, the dog was depressed and miserable. She wouldn’t eat for a week. At first, Maggie and the pooch shared rice chips. She wouldn’t eat anything else, and she wouldn’t touch dog food, but then she got back in the swing of eating chow.

   She had a bad ear infection, but, luckily, Maggie had ear medication left over from other dogs they had rescued. Their vet came over to check her out because she had some small lumps on her chest. Tracy the Vet said they were probably fatty lumps and nothing to worry about. She ran the dog’s blood, just in case.

   Steve put a call in to the pound and left a description of the dog and his phone number, but no one ever called back. Maggie didn’t know if she was going to be able to give her to anybody, but thought she had to find her a home, even if it was only with another rescuer.

   They put up fliers with other rescuers, passing them to each other, by word of mouth and on Facebook. They found a home for her in no time. A few days after Steve found the German Shepherd, Maggie tagged her sister about a Yorkie.  Her sister had needed to put her own Yorkie down a couple of months earlier.

   “I want the dog,” she said.

   Maggie called about picking up the Yorkie.

   “When can I grab the dog?”

   She drove to Elyria and picked up the eleven-month-old dog. He was going to be Maggie’s sister and nephew’s Christmas present, but they had to fix him up first, in more ways than one.

   An older woman had bought the dog from a breeder, but she broke her leg and ended up in a nursing home. Her kids locked the puppy in the garage for three weeks. They were sick idiots. They fed him, sure, throwing some food into the garage now and then, but they neglected the animal. He went from being spoiled rotten to having no one, no matter how rotten they were.

   Finally, a neighbor took the Yorkie, but soon decided the dog was vicious.

   “Oh, it’s vicious, vicious, it snarls at me, and lunges at me,” the lady said.

   “All seven pounds of it” Maggie said.

   “Yes, he won’t let me pass out of the kitchen.”

   “Just give me the dog,” Maggie said.

   People are so stupid, she thought. Sometimes I hate them. “Dogs never bite me, only people,” she told the Yorkie. “Honestly, I’d rather hang out with dogs,” she told anybody who would listen.

   Most of the Yorkie’s problem was that he had never been neutered. That was going to take a lot of his attitude out of him. The rest of it was they let him act like that. You don’t let a dog act like he wants to. You are the alpha dog, not the dog. He learned quick enough who the alpha dog was in Maggie’s house.

   “When they’re aggressive you have to show them that you’re more dominant than they are.”

   Maggie said no, and the Yorkie growled, showing his teeth, and she picked him up and put him on his back. If it’s a little dog, you put them on their backs. If it’s a big dog, you press on their backs until you hear the sigh of release.

   “We don’t do that in this house,” she explained.

   She put him in a cage.

   “Ugh,” he said, and said it again.

   But cage training is better than force training. After that he was a good boy, running around on the couch, playing with his rope and toy. When she gave him to her sister, she explained how to restrain him when he acted out, and to make sure she had a cage for him, just in case.

   The next day Steve came home with another Yorkie.

   “It’s for my cousin,” he said.

   Steve’s cousin Clint had been a heroin addict who had to have his legs amputated.

   “He isn’t still using, is he?” Maggie asked.

   “He needs a dog,” Steve said, and that was all he said.

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. 

Help support these stories. $25 a year (7 cents a day). Contact edwardstaskus@gmail.com for details

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

A Cold War Thriller

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

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

Late summer and early autumn, New York City, 1956. Stickball in the streets and the Mob on the make. President Eisenhower on his way to Ebbets Field for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Bt Ed Staskus

   Unless somebody knows Steve de Luca, it won’t make sense. Unless they know him, inside and out, where he came from, it won’t make sense to them. What made sense to Maggie Campbell was that he was a good guy, and always had been, except for a few detours.

   It all started when Steve was living in Florida with his sisters and mother. He had just gotten out of jail, where he was locked up for contempt of court. He wouldn’t give away what he knew about somebody to the judge. He was covering for somebody and wouldn’t tell anybody anything. Then his father died in 1999. He came back to Cleveland for the funeral. After the funeral his brother Fat Freddie begged him to stay.

   “Stay here stay with me,” Freddie pleaded. “You can stay at the house and we can work together. It will be great.”

   “Blah, blah, blah.” That’s the way Freddie had always been.

   So, Steve moved back to Ohio, to Cleveland, to Little Italy. There used to be a Big Italy, near downtown, near the Central Market, but in the 1960s new freeways and urban renewal wiped it all out. Little Italy is on the east side, up from Euclid Ave. up Mayfield Rd. and all the way up to Cleveland Heights.

   Little Italy was a hundred years old by then. It was Italian stonemasons from the Abruzzi who settled it. They built the Holy Rosary Roman Catholic Church and sculpted the giant headstones and monuments at Lake View Cemetery at the top of Mayfield Rd.

   Maggie and Steve met in 2001 when he was living with Freddie. He had become a full-blown addict in the meantime. When she met him, he was drinking up to a fifth of Yukon a day with beer chasers and snorting coke so he could keep drinking. Maggie was living in Lorain. She was a gal from Bay Village, on the west side, as far away from Little Italy as could be in more ways than one. They met at a party at a bar. It didn’t seem like they had much in common except that his father had just died, and her father had just died, too.

  Maggie’s childhood was staid while Steve’s was more exciting than most. There was alcohol and drugs, there was money, there was the Mafia. They were all in on it. The Little Italy house they lived in they got from Danny Greene as a gift. Steve’s father was a mob lawyer. He wasn’t a crook, although he sprang crooks free.

   Danny Greene was a mobster during Cleveland’s gang wars in the 1970s. The Irish and Italians were always trying to blow each other up. One time a rival gangster tried to blow up Danny Greene’s car, but Danny found the bomb and disarmed it. He showed it to the Cleveland Police Department’s Bomb Squad. “Do you want to press charges?” they asked. “Do you want police protection?”

   The Irishman just laughed. “I’ll take care of it myself,” he said. He later blew up the rival gangster. Everybody thought he used the same bomb. Everybody was right.

   Danny wore a medal of St. Jude around his neck and took care of other people, including eight hit men who tried to get him. But, one day when he was leaving his dentist’s office, getting into his car, the Trojan Horse car next to him exploded and he was blown to bits. Even though Danny Greene and Steve’s father were tight, he defended the hit man who killed the Irishman.

   Steve’s uncles used to hide drugs and stuff in the kid’s rooms, in his room, so if the police searched, they believed the cops wouldn’t search those rooms. They hid everything under the carpets. After Steve and Maggie got married, they finally stopped having a traditional Easter breakfast with the uncles because she thought it was sacrilegious.

   Steve’s uncle Angelo was one of the heads of the Youngstown Mafia. They would go to their house for Easter. They would be sitting at the table, the godfathers, cooing over their babies, pinching the butts of babes, shoveling food into their mouths, and talking on their phones.

   “I started wondering, what are they going to be doing later in the afternoon? I finally decided I couldn’t have Easter breakfast, on the day Jesus died, with hit men. I just couldn’t do it.”

   Steve and Maggie saw each other for ten months before they decided to get married. At first, they lived in Maggie’s brother’s mother-in-law’s old Polish double house on Berea Rd. They were planning their marriage and honeymoon. Then Brad’s mother-in-law accused Maggie of running up the water bill.

   “You’re doing hair at home,” she said.

  Maggie double-checked the water bill. She blew up. “Do you think my doing hair at home is costing this much water? I do half a dozen heads at home a month. I don’t fill up the bathtub for each head, for God’s sake!”

   The mother-in-law had a Section 8 family with special needs kids living upstairs in the double house. Steve and Maggie lived downstairs. One night at two in the morning she felt water dripping from their bedroom ceiling. She went upstairs.

   Bang, bang, bang, she knocked.

   When the kids came to the door they were in their underpants, swinging pots and pans full of water, and firing water guns. What is happening here, she wondered. 

   “Stop that!” she commanded.

   Not only did the family upstairs do all their laundry every night, but the folks who were supposed to watch the kids during the day did their own laundry in the basement, too. The washing machine was always going, night and day.

   “You’re accusing Steve and me of using all this water, really?” They got into a fight on the spot. “Steve and I have been nothing but fair and kind to you. We’ve taken care of the yard and we’ve taken care of the house. Fuck this, we’re leaving.”

  They packed up and left, even though they didn’t have anywhere to go. They got married and moved back to Fat Freddie’s house in Little Italy. They weren’t there long before Maggie started looking for her own home. She couldn’t stand living with Freddie and his hi-jinks.

   “He loved it because I did all the grocery shopping, all the cooking, and all the cleaning, too,” she said. “But Freddie and I didn’t get along. He had a not-so-funny sense of humor. A good man is hard to find, and he was a good man when helping Steve rescue stray dogs, but I needed to wash that man out of my hair.”

Ed Staskus posts on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

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. Jackson Pollack opens a can of worms. President Eisenhower on his way to the opening game of the World Series where 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

   “We’re going to have to get out of here or I’m going to kill him,” Maggie Campbell said. She meant it more than anything. “Dead as a doornail,” she added, looking around for a loose butcher knife with a sharp edge.

   Steve de Luca her brand new husband didn’t say anything. What could he say? Fat Freddie was his older brother, and they were living in Fat Freddie’s house in Little Italy. The house was small and cramped. Freddie made it worse than it was.

   He wasn’t just their landlord. He was an annoying brother-in-law with coleslaw for brains. He stayed up late listening to heavy metal. He had sketchy friends. He stuck his dirty food wrappers into Maggie’s make-up bag when she wasn’t looking because he thought it would be funny when she found them. It wasn’t funny. She told Steve there was going to be trouble. There was going to be blood. They started looking for a house of their own.

   They discussed argued prayed about the kind of house they wanted. “I want a home where when you go there they have to take you in,” Maggie said. She prayed in English and Steve prayed in Italian.  He told his wife Italian was God’s native language and had the Big Man’s ear. “The USA is God’s country,” Maggie countered. “I mean, the Pope isn’t even Protestant, for Christ’s sake.”

   They wanted central air, three bedrooms, and a dry basement. They wanted a fenced-in backyard. They searched for a long time and finally their prayers were answered when they found a two-story house in West Park. They were one of the first people to see it, put a bid on it right away, and got it.

   They got everything they wanted, basically. The kitchen was large enough, the basement was waterproofed, and the back porch covered, although the backyard wasn’t dog friendly the way they wanted it, not at all. It needed lots of fence.

   The first two years of living there they had a backyard of mud. It was because they had up to 4 dogs at any one time, some theirs, some rescues. The lawn grass didn’t stand a chance. When the dogs came into the house puddles of mud tracked in with them. Since Maggie was a clean freak, it freaked her out.

   “It’s a shame we can’t cement in the whole backyard,” she said to Steve.

   “I’ve got a guy for that,” Steve said. He had a guy for everything. His guy put up a fence and laid down stone stamps in the patio. They put in river rocks, large ones around the small patio, and small ones in a big bed next to the garage where the dogs could go potty.

   That made it easy to clean up. Steve hosed down the patio, hosed down the river rock bed in the back, and picked up every day. He stuffed it all in a garbage bag and tossed it in a garbage can. “What else am I going to do with it?” he asked their mean gossipy neighbor Dawn when she wrinkled her nose.

   They bought a grill and cooked outside spring summer fall. Even though Dawn’s nose angled for an invitation, they never invited her over. In her case a good fence made a good neighbor.

   Even though they liked their new house right away, it was awful. It was decorated like an old man’s house. The outside clapboard was painted dingy yellow and brown. Inside the woodwork and walls were painted a vague gray. Maggie was not a gray person.

   “Home is where the heart is, but this place needs a new heart,” she said.

   They painted everything, the outside of the house, and all the inside, too. Maggie had lots of design ideas and a lot of ideas about new colors. They ripped the shag carpets out right away. Then they re-did the hardwood floors. Maggie swore to herself she would never have the house carpeted again. 

   Except then the next two winters in Cleveland happened. Lake Erie froze solid as a rock. “What happened to global warming?” Steve asked. It was winter for a long time for two straight seasons. Getting up every morning, tramping on the cold hardwood floors first thing, one morning Maggie finally said, “We’re not doing this anymore. We’re getting carpeting for our bedroom.” There were two bedrooms. The other one was for friends and junk.

   Steve was against putting in new carpeting. He could be against anything, especially if he didn’t want to do it, but he never said a hard no way that is happening.

   “Do what you want,” he said, scowling.

   Maggie did what she wanted. “Of course, now he loves the carpet. He drags his big bare feet through it. Stop rubbing your gross feet in my new carpet I tell him, but he never listens.”

   The dogs were not allowed upstairs. They were not allowed beyond the kitchen. The rules were set in stone and stated they could be in the kitchen or in the basement. A gate was set up at the dining room doorway. Even so, just after they had the carpeting laid down, Grayson their young Lab got through the Berlin Wall, went right upstairs, and peed on the new carpet. 

   Maggie posted an extra warning at the base of the stairs. “No dogs upstairs, especially no Grayson.” The dogs did their best trying to read it but couldn’t understand a word. They understood when she smacked them on the butt.

   They let their dogs into the living room sometimes. That’s why there were always hooked blankets stacked near their sectional. They let the dogs jump on the sofa so they could sit and snuggle with them. “Only Captain Hook, our Husky, is not a snug. He’ll cuddle for five minutes and then he’s done with you.

   There was another living room in the basement. There was a television, bistro table, and another sectional. All the dog food and water bowls were in the basement, too. Captain Hook always slept in his dog bed, but the others lay out on the couch. It was completely chewed up. They pawed it and dug into it when they were settling in. “I don’t know what the digging thing is all about, but it’s their couch,” Steve said. “They can do what they want, destroy it if they want. Only, when it’s completely gone, it’s gone. They’re not getting another one from me.”

   Birdie didn’t care. He was the only one of their dogs who had his own digs. His name was above the front door of his dog house. He didn’t let any of the other dogs visit unless they brought treats with them.

   The biggest troublemaker was Pebbles. They called her Steam Shovel. “She’s the one who truly wrecks the sofa,” Maggie said. “She is my digger. She’s the reason we used to have a nice living room in the basement until it all got destroyed.”

   Even though Steve and Maggie decided they weren’t getting any more sectionals, no more couches, or anything else new in the basement, Christmas was ridiculous at their house. “Steve and I buy our dogs lots of gifts,” Maggie said. “I start buying presents for them right after New Year’s when everything is discounted. Towards the end of summer, I start buying dog treats whenever I see them on sale. It’s not good if I buy them any earlier than September. Steve finds them and gives them to the dogs. So, I always start that later in the year.”

   The dogs got stockings full of toys on Christmas Day.  They ripped into their gifts in the morning. Then the mess started for real. The toys were in stockings stuffed with stuffing, just like pillows. The dogs took their stockings outside and tore them apart to get at the squeakers inside of them. By the end of the month the backyard was full of dull as dishwater stuffing stuck in the ice.

   “It looks like a hillbilly backyard until I can finally get out there when winter is changing to spring and chip it out of the melting ice,” Steve said. “I don’t like it that it looks so bad all winter long, but what can you do?”

   “Thank God we have a privacy fence,” Maggie thought, keeping her fingers crossed for an early spring.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

By Ed Staskus

   Maggie Campbell sprays Lysol on everything. “It’s the Windex of germ killers,” she said. She buys it by the case. “It’s good for everything. It kills everything, every kind of flu, strep, anything.” She sprays it on her doorknobs, handles, couches, pillows, blankets, and her bed, as well as everything else in the house. It soaks in, dries, and afterwards it all smells good. She likes the freshwater scent best.

   She even sprayed Lysol into her water glass by accident and drank it. It just happened, not that she meant to, but when it did, she thought, all right, it will kill all the germs inside me from the inside out.

   When Jesse was staying at their house and caught the flu, she sprayed him on purpose.

   Maggie and her husband Steve de Luca were in Mexico, Kristen was watching their dogs, but she got sick, and got the vommies. Her old friend Jimmy Crack Corn happened to need somewhere to stay, so he took over from Kristen. Maggie told him to spray the house down.

   “Jewel, catching the flu is for weak people,” he said. 

   “Only the weak catch colds? He’s so big and strong? Of course, he got the flu right away, the bog oaf.” Which is why she had no problem spraying him the minute she got home. When they stepped into the living room, she told him she was going to have to spray him and the couch he was lounging on. He didn’t like it, but gave in.

  “Close your mouth and eyes,” she told him. The spray kills 99 per cent of germs. The ones that survive go back and tell their germ friends, don’t mess with Lysol!

   “I swear your dog tried to hop me,” Jimmy said afterwards.

   “Don’t talk about my dog like that,” Maggie said. “Which one?”

   “Veruka, she hopped me, held me down, I swear she was trying.”

   He told Maggie about it while he was lying on the sofa with Fat Pebbles. They are girlfriend and boyfriend. The de Luca house is crazy. They have six dogs ever since they got Hermy. You have to be a little crazy to hang out at their house. Jimmy was more than a little crazy.

   “I was upstairs sleeping when Veruka jumped me,” he said. “I was herding her down to the kitchen, to the basement where their couch is, when out comes your husband into the hallway. He was butt naked.”

   “I warned you, if you are going to stay here, Steve hardly ever wears clothes.”

   “I have nothing to hide,” said Steve.

   “Goddamn, I thought I was going to go blind,” Jimmy said. 

   Jimmy and Maggie have been friends since 5^th grade. They dated a little in the 7^th and 8^th grades but were both too controlling to be a couple. He’s controlling, Maggie’s controlling, but they stayed friends. He’s been Maggie’s best and worst friend ever since. They text each other every day, all day, forty times a day. If Steve and she are out to dinner, and Steve says something funny or interesting, she will call or text Jimmy right away.

   “Guess what Steve-o just said!” That’s the kind of friendship they have. ”He was talking about you!”

   They ran into Jimmy a couple of years after getting married. They were surprised. He was surprised. They had been on the outs.

   “What are you two doing together?” he asked.

   Steve and Maggie are not your typical couple. She was a good girl in high school, Steve was a drug supplier, and Jimmy was one of his drug users.

   “I married her,” Steve said.

   “You stole my girl,” Jimmy burst out..

    “Oh, my God,” Maggie groaned.

   Maggie ended up laughing about it and since then they’ve been back to being friends. She calls Jimmy her husband #2.

   Jimmy’s dad was once a cop in Cleveland. He used to sit outside Steve’s dad’s house in Little Italy in an unmarked car. The house was bugged. His dad’s job was to listen in. Sometimes he would hear Steve and his son hanging out together. They were both on a bad path.

   “Jimmy is in and out of our lives,” Maggie said. “He has a bad temper. He gets mad at you, cuts you out for a couple of years, but then comes back. He came back into our lives after a two-year stint of being gone. Something happened and he disappeared. After Kristen got sick and Jimmy took over, if he hadn’t been able to stay at our house, he wouldn’t have had a place to stay. He’s in recovery, like Steve, but unlike Steve he’s always slipping up and falling off the wagon. He got back on his feet with our help.”

   Jimmy works with heavy machinery and he’s going to start taking crane classes as soon as he’s done being down and out with the flu, which he caught even though he’s not a weak person. He is so strong, or so he says.

   Maggie made the mistake of getting Steve a hand bell when he got sick, Lysol or no Lysol. “That will never happen again. He completely abused the bell.” Most guys are like that. After the bell got lost and they couldn’t find it, Steve started called her Sharon. Sharon is rock ‘n’ roll Ozzie Osborne’s wife. She can never find anything in their house. 

   Maggie’s new nickname became Sharon soon enough.

   When Jimmy was feeling better, he and Steve went to Malley’s Chocolates and bought her a box of Bordeaux Chocolate. Malley’s is an ice cream and candy and chocolate store. There are 22 of the stores. They went to the original one in Lakewood, which opened in 1935. The Malley family lived in the back of the building back in the day.

   When they got back to their house Jimmy left the box of chocolate on the kitchen counter for Maggie. He didn’t know that dogs can and will eat anything if you let them. They have had dogs that would eat green peppers. Veruka, their spoiled rotten Leonberger, will eat fruits and vegetables. She will eat crumbs. She will eat anything.

   When Steve and Jimmy went upstairs Veruka strolled up from the basement. She busted through the baby gate in the kitchen doorway. Her plan was to sneak into the upstairs bedrooms and accost them. The box of chocolate stopped her in her tracks.

   She knew the chocolate wasn’t for her. But Veruka is the kind of dog who doesn’t care, just doesn’t care. She ate the whole box of on her way upstairs. Her dog mouth dog lips dog tongue got all chocolaty. She was licking it off her face when they saw her. There was no need for Lysol. Veruka gave them a look that said, “Don’t bother saying anything and forget the disinfectant.”

Ed Staskus posts on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”