By Ed Staskus

   Tony de Marco had a bad headache. It got up to full speed the second he got up from an unsound sleep. When he stood up he was swept by a wave of nausea. He had to grab the headboard to keep from falling over. He felt sick and slaphappy eating breakfast. He was unhappy walking to the newsstand to get a copy of the Daily Mirror. He was unhappy riding the train to Ebbets Field. He hadn’t been able to jump the turnstile and had to pay the full fare.

   He couldn’t shake the headache off. Turning his head to either side even slightly made it worse. It felt like his brain had gotten too big for his head, like it was swollen. He closed his eyes. He tried to read the tabloid but couldn’t concentrate. He closed his eyes again. A minute later he was getting some shuteye, lulled to sleep by the rocking of the train. He slept through a ten-minute nightmare of Korea. It wasn’t hard. He had dreamt hundreds of them about what went on in the cold hills north of the border.

   He woke up when his station was called. He knew he wouldn’t miss the call when he dozed off, which is why he could doze off. He never missed his stop, even though his hearing was bad. It was like his mind screened out the talk of the passengers but was tuned in to hear the voice of the PA system. He felt better. He wasn’t on the sunny side of street, but he was out of the dark clouds. Stepping off the train, crossing Bedford Avenue, the ballpark came into sight. 

   “Goddamn that Robert Moses,” he cursed under his breath, a shadow crossing his face.

   Everybody knew somebody was going to have to blow up the Moses bus before the Dodgers ever got a new stadium. Ebbets Field was the smallest park in the National League. The seats were bad. The toilets were bad. Nobody ever went to the bathrooms unless it was an emergency. There was practically no parking anywhere. Even sold-out games didn’t help, although they helped. The Atlantic Yards was where the team wanted to go. But Moses wanted them to move to a city-owned stadium in Queens. Moses was the city’s all-powerful mover and shaker. If anybody could make it happen, he could make it happen.

   But for once what he wanted wasn’t going to happen. “We’re the Brooklyn Dodgers, not the Queens Dodgers,” the boss had said. Nobody in Brooklyn wanted to be a Queen Bum.

   Walter O’Malley was the boss. He was determined to get a bigger ballpark somewhere else. The stink of relocating was in the air. He’d been planning it for ten years. They were already playing some of their home games at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City. They had played the first one there almost two weeks ago, edging the Phillies by a run. 

   O’Malley was going to beat down Moses, no matter how many commandments he had to break. There was no doubt about it. The big man was going to move the team, that was for sure, maybe move out of Brooklyn, maybe even move to the west coast, even though there wasn’t a team anywhere west of Kansas City. It would be like moving to the moon.

   “Jeez, Jersey City, already!” Tony muttered and spat on the sidewalk.

   The King of Hanky-Panky of Jersey City was gone, he wasn’t the mayor anymore, but his gang was still running things, and he was still living like a millionaire. Anybody who said anything about it to him was told he was a rotten commie. Then he was punched in the nose. Then he was thrown out of town.

   The drive to the ballpark in Jersey City was terrible. There were no shoulders on the Pulaski Skyway over the Hackensack and Passaic rivers. The breakdown lane was in the middle of the bridge. Everybody called it the suicide lane. They were finally building a concrete median to put a stop to the head-on accidents. Once you got over the bridge everything smelled like soap and cheap perfume, especially the closer downwind you got to the Colgate Plant on Hudson Street.

   It was the first day of May. It was sunny, in the low 50s, the sky a faraway blue. By the time he got to work on the field it might hit 60. The team was in Cincy playing the Redlegs. The grounds crew had the rest of the week and more to get the home field in tip-top shape. After that it was nothing but rule the roost games the rest of the month. Tony was sure the Bums would be in first place the beginning of June.

   He walked past the ballpark, crossed Flatbush Avenue, and strolled into Prospect Park. He had a half-hour to kill. When he got to the shore opposite Duck Island, he found a bench and sat down, looking over the water. He pulled a pack of cigarettes and a Ronson lighter from his jacket pocket. His headache wasn’t any worse. It was probably a little better. He wasn’t sure but hoped so.

   “L & M filters are just what the doctor ordered!” is what the ads said. Maybe a smoke would make him feel better. He leaned back and lit up, watching a duck and a line of ducklings waddling into the water. One of the ducks stayed on the shore, standing sideways, keeping the business side of his eyes on him.

   There was a wall of six and seven-foot-high butterfly bushes flanking and to the back of the bench. In the summer, once it got good and hot and the red lilac-like flowers bloomed, the bushes attracted butterflies and hummingbirds. Now that the ducks were back in town, he would have to remember to bring a bag of stale bread to the park.

   Tony sometimes ate lunch in Prospect Park when the team was on the road. When they were at home there was too much work to do. He was on the work gang that rolled the tarpaulin out when rainstorms loomed, when it was all hands on deck, and he had his own assigned work, but he never did any mowing. The head groundskeeper made sure the grass was cut everyday if the team was in town. He might cut the infield grass shorter than usual if a bunt happy team was on the schedule. When Jackie Robinson had been younger and faster than just about anybody the grass was always kept long and the dirt in front of home plate watered down for him. The Colored Comet’s first ever hit for the Dodgers had been a bunt single.

   One of Tony’s jobs was laying the foul lines, the coaching boxes, and the batting boxes. Jackie Robinson still stole home two and three times a year. Tony made sure the chalk line from third base to home was straight as an arrow, leading the way to the promised land.

   He took a drag on his lung dart and felt better. He would have to tell the doc about his headaches. The medicine man had been able to help him with his bad dreams without shock treatments or talking about combat fatigue and all the rest of their psycho crap. He knew most of the VA shrinks yakked it up about hostility and neurosis aroused by warfare. They didn’t know anything about bad weather in Korea that never stopped, mud frozen solid, and no sunlight day after day. They didn’t know anything about gooks with burp guns that never stopped. They didn’t know anything about feast that never stopped. They didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. They didn’t know how goddamned horrible it was.

   He was lucky to have found Doc Baird, although when he thought about it, it was more like Doc Baird had found him. He couldn’t remember exactly how it happened. Besides the ear doctor in Japan, who told him he had lost some of his hearing, Doc Baird was the only medicine man he had talked to the past three years who made sure to face his good ear when they were talking.

   “They didn’t have earplugs or nothing for us,” Tony told Doctor Baird.

   “They’d say, you just have to live with it. Put paper or cotton in your ears. They didn’t care about us. I had to go to a MASH hospital one time. There was something wrong with me. I thought it might have been pneumonia. That night they brought in a bunch of guys who’d been in a firefight, crying and hollering, all mangled up, bleeding like stuck pigs. I couldn’t stand it. I left and hitchhiked back to my outfit.”

   The ducklings swam in a broken line behind their mother duck, who was putting up a racket to keep her brood together and safe. He had once seen a turtle rise up and gobble down a duckling. It was gone in the blink of an eye, just like that.

   “When did you serve in Korea?” Doctor Baird asked.

   “I was there from the start, at Inchon. I got drafted in 1949, right after I turned 21, when the new law said everybody over 18 had to register. I didn’t have any luck. Only ten thousand guys got drafted that whole year and I was one of them. I didn’t want to go. My doctor wrote them a letter saying I had a bad back and they couldn’t use me. My boss wrote a letter saying we can’t spare him, we need him for the team, but they didn’t listen to nothing.”

   “You didn’t want to join up?”

   “No, but when my number was up, I went down to the draft board. There was a big Marine there. He got us all lined up in a row. He’d hit a guy in the chest. Marine! A couple more guys, he would hit another one in the chest. Marine! When he got to me, he looked me up and down, and went to the next guy. He didn’t want me. I weighed less than 130 pounds then. They pushed me into the Army on a two-year plan and sent me to Fort Dix. We had a newspaper there, the Stars and Stripes. It said, ‘Fort Dix Turns Out Killers’. They called us killers. I didn’t know what it was all about. I wasn’t mad at anybody. I wasn’t any kind of killer.”

   The ducks dipped their heads underwater as they swam, scooping up plants and insects. The drake on the shore walked off looking for land bugs and dandelion greens. Waddling away he twisted his head around and grunted, then whistled at Tony. He didn’t hear the whistle, just like he didn’t hear birdsongs, not if they went into his bad ear.

   “You lost some of your hearing in the one ear while you were in the artillery?”

   “I lost a lot in the one ear, yeah. I wasn’t supposed to be in that racket, but that’s what happened,” said Tony. “Most of the guys I trained with went to Europe, where they didn’t have to do nothing. Three squads of us got sent to Korea. I had to fly to Seattle, wait thirty days, and then they put us on a ship across the Pacific, which took another twenty days. When we landed in Yokohama, we thought, maybe we’ll just stay in Japan, but the next thing I knew I was landing at Inchon in a barge. Nothing went right for me after that.”

   “What went wrong?” the doctor asked, doodling on a notepad with no notes in it. He was listening with half an ear. He knew everything about Tony he needed to know. The sessions were for show and reinforcement.

   “I was trained for the infantry, but after we landed, they said, we have enough infantry guys, we need guys in the artillery. They sent me to the 37^th Field Artillery Battalion, the Second Division. They gave us a patch for our sleeves with a star and an Indian on it. We used to say, ‘Second to None!’ Right away they put me in a gun section, and we got orders for a fire mission. We had twelve guns, 105’s, loud as hell, just boom, boom, boom hour after hour. When it was over and the guys were talking, all I could hear was lips moving. I couldn’t hear a damn thing for a half hour. I wasn’t used to that kind of noise.”

   “How did you get captured?” asked Doctor Baird.

   “What happened, after about four months, after Inchon, they said, you’ve got infantry training, right, we’re going to make you a forward observer, so I had go back to the infantry. My job was to tell our guys where to shoot the stuff. If there were a thousand gooks in the open, we’d say, shoot the stuff that explodes in the air. It would rain down on those guys, the shrapnel getting them. Other times it was quick shells, the kind that explode the instant they hit the ground, or delays, the kind that stick in the ground and blow up later.”

   “You were fighting the North Koreans?”

   “No, we were fighting the Chinese, tough guys, small, always blowing bugles, padded up in quilt coats. They knew how to stay warm, not like us, with the summer outfits MacArthur sent us. They were good with mortars. If a round landed in front of you, and right away another landed behind you, we always said, get the hell out of the middle. There wasn’t anything but one hill after another in Korea. We would lob over the hills to the other side when our infantry was going up the near side to take it. We tried to shoot over them, down on the gooks, but sometimes it would land on our own guys.” It was friendly fire gone suddenly unfriendly fire.

   “That’s what happened to me and my buddy. We got caught in some wire. You always had to watch for incoming rounds. As long as you heard a whistle, you’re OK. The one that gets you, you never hear it. My buddy got killed, and I got all cut up. I couldn’t get off the wire. I still have scars on my arms. The Chinese picked me up. They had me for about three weeks. It was bad, and I got sick, something in my stomach, and when there was a prisoner exchange, they sent me back. I got flown to Japan and was in a hospital for a month, but I made it out alive.”

   Tony stubbed the L & M butt under his heel. He tucked his lighter away. It was time to go to work. He thought about the Greek kid. It was the kind of thing that happened when you were doing some killing while the other guy was trying to kill you at the same time.

   “There was a Greek kid in my outfit, he was a baseball player, but he got a leg blown off. They gave him an artificial leg. The thing hurt him where it was attached. He took aspirins all the time. He drank whiskey when he had to. He didn’t tell anybody about it and tried to get back into the game. He had an arm like a cannon, but what can you do on one real leg? He was still trying to make it in the minors after I got home, but, of course, he never made it.”

   The home plate entrance to Ebbets Field was an 80-foot rotunda made of Italian marble. Tony never went in the front door. He went around the back, to a door behind the bleachers in center field. He checked in with the watchman and went to his locker.

   “When I got healthy, they said, you can go home unless you want to re-up. We’ll give you $300.00 if you do that. We made $90.00 a month and they paid us $45.00 extra whenever we were in combat. But they didn’t want to pay me for the couple of months I still had left on my two years, so I said, no way.”

   “You went home after you got better?” asked Doctor Baird.

   “Yeah, I came home to Brooklyn, got my old job back, except my old job was turned into cleaning in the aisles and bleachers, but I worked my way back up. All the real bums sit in the bleachers. I’m doing maintenance work now, better pay.”

   After Tony changed into his work clothes in the grounds crew locker room, he walked out to the field. They were raking the sand clay mix today, including the infield, foul lines, and on-deck plot. His headache was gone, thank God. The ballpark was going to look good for the Giants next week.

   “Hey Tony, big night tonight with Phil?” asked one of the three men with rakes resting on their shoulders as he walked up to them with his own rake.

   “You bet,” he said. “It’s Bilko time tonight. He gets it over on the con men who try to gyp one of his guys. Ike’s going to like this one”

   Dwight Eisenhower was a big fan of “You’ll Never Get Rich.” Earlier in the season the Master of Chutzpah had gotten a telegram from Ike’s press secretary. “The Old Man missed last night’s show,” it said. A print of the show was immediately shipped to the White House.

   “I bet you saw it filmed,” one of the men said.

   “That would be a good bet. They made everybody roll around on the floor before the show, except for Silver, because their uniforms came in looking too crisp, too starchy, for them being in the motor pool. They looked scruffy enough when they were done.”

   The show was filmed live in Chelsea in a building that used to be the armory for the Ninth Mounted Cavalry. It was shot like a play and recorded to film. It was a comedy and Phil Silvers ad-libbed like a man lost in his own thoughts. Tony had been in the audience more than a dozen times. He always looked forward to the comedian coming up with something off the top of his cue ball head. It was why Tony de Marco’s nickname was Tony the Phil.

   Tony was a buff of Master Sergeant Ernest Bilko, who was named after Chicago Cubs first baseman Steve Bilko. “Bingo to Bango to Bilko” was the way the Chicago radio play-by-play man called double plays executed by shortstop Ernie Banks, second baseman Gene Baker, and Steve Bilko. Tony never missed a show, unless the Dodgers were playing under the lights, when it was Fernandez to Robinson to Nelson.

   He wasn’t the only fan of the show among the crew, but he was the show’s biggest fan among them. Sergeant Bilko was a crafty devil whose get-rich-quick schemes almost always fell flat on their face. His tips for success and riches never panned out either, but nobody ever bad-mouthed him for trying. They loved him for trying.

   “They always lose, sure, but they don’t blame me, because to a gambler a bad tip is better than no tip at all,” Phil Silvers said with a straight face..

   A short man wearing a plaid cap, a stogie stuck in his thick lips, standing on the far side of the pitcher’s mound in a pair of green knee-high rubber boots, waved a hand at Tony. “Hey, go out there and check the drainage in center,” said Max Ringolsby, the crew chief, pointing over the top of the second base bag. “Duke said something about the grass being damp out there. Maybe the drain is clogged.”

   The Duke of Flatbush was the team’s best outfielder, usually assigned to roam center field. He was money in the bank when a deep line drive had to be caught at all costs. The year before he had been the National League’s MVP runner-up. Nobody wanted to see him go head over heels on a slick spot.

   Tony walked off the infield, into the outfield, to the middle of center field, and found the drain. He got down on his hands and knees. The ground was more waterlogged than it should have been. Drainpipes crisscrossed the field and water flowed down a slight fall to a larger drainpipe that ran into the storm water system. The pipe was about four inches below the sand, clay, and gravel that was below the grass.

   Tony cut a block of sod from around the drain and dug down to the drain grate. It was stopped up with debris. He retrieved a screwdriver from the tool room and removed the cover. He put it on the ground beside him and started cleaning it. He had the feeling somebody was watching him. He looked around the field. Almost everybody was working at something. Nobody was watching him. He could smell a rat when he saw one.

   He bent forward and looked into the drain. A brown rat leaned up and looked back at him. He might have been a foot-and-half stretched out. His teeth were long but ground down. Rats chewed on anything, including cement, brick, and lead pipes. One of the guys fed scrambled eggs to the rats that hung around their locker room. Tony wondered what he was doing in the middle of the day, when he should have been napping. He didn’t wonder that the rat was in the sewer. They could tread water for days.

   They bred and lived and bred and died in Ebbets Field. They never left. Why would they leave? Everywhere except the ballpark was a menace. They had been there since the stadium was built in 1913, generation after generation of them, because there were always leftover hot dogs, soft pretzels, and Cracker Jack beneath the seats and around overflowing trash bins.

   “Boo,” Tony the Phil said softly.

   The brown rat blinked, twitched, and skittered back into the storm drain.

Excerpted from the crime novel “Cross Walk.”

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.” 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 Cold War shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication