By Ed Staskus

   Bumpy Williams had a receding off-center chin and green eyes. They were a colorless shade of green. They were always dead set on the prize whenever he was doing a job of work. He rarely missed what he meant to see. When he saw it he tucked it away in the back of his mind. It was a sunny steamy day the last week of summer. He was on a job. The back of his mind was ready. 

   He was wearing a brown single-breasted jacket with brown pleated trousers, but his shoes were gaudy City Club two-lace two-tones. His face was what made him good at what he did. There was a jagged scar on one side of his chin. Nobody wanted to get caught staring at his crooked chin or the scar and nobody ever looked in the vicinity of his eyes, which when he was working had a one-dimensional look to them. Nobody wanted to ever get into a knife fight in a phone booth with him, where calling for help would always be too late.

   There were those who couldn’t even say whether he was a white or black man, even though he was a Negro. Some men and women avoided him, hugging the gutter side of the sidewalk. It was Thursday, a week before the end of summer, and he could hear Doris Day singing ‘Whatever Will Be Will Be’ on a car radio, the car’s four windows wide open, easing down the street. White people are always down in the damned dumps, he thought. Little Richard had ‘Rip It Up’ and ‘Ready Teddy’ on the Billboard 100 chart. That was his kind of slippin’ and slidin’ music.

   He had a dog-eared copy of All-Negro Comics in his back pocket. He had five dollars and change in his wallet, a 6-ounce stainless steel flask with a picture of a roller-skating chimp on it, and a Vest Pocket Colt .25 in a vest pocket. The small handgun was only good at close range, but it was better than nothing. 

   He stood still and looked at the four-story building on the other side of the street. Queen Stephanie’s man had said the snooper worked on the second floor. A sign on the building said ‘Duluc Detective’ in green and white neon letters. He was at the right place. The building was one back from the corner of West 48^th Street and 10^th Avenue.

   Bumpy looked into the parking lot behind him. This is going to be easy, he thought. He would put the glad hand on a car nearby, and park it in the lot where he could spy on the front door, keeping track of the comings and goings. A separate door on the side in plain sight led up to the private eye’s office. There was a cobbler’s shop and a barbershop on the ground floor and apartments on the top two floors.

   He could see an oversized gold register and a line of shoeshine chairs with brass pedestals. The repair shop was probably in the basement. The heels of his two-tones needed repairing, but he didn’t like the idea of leaving his shoes in Hell’s Kitchen. Bumpy took his to Romeo’s Shoe Repair in mid-town, in the garment district, off Seventh Avenue, even though there wasn’t a Romeo anymore. Romeo was the man who opened the store in 1928 and sold it six years later to another man named Gaetano. He kept the sign, so he became the second Romeo, even though he wasn’t a Romeo, and his son Marco became the third one.

   There was a barbershop next to the show repair shop. It was the No Embarrassment Barber Shop. A sign said, ‘Hair Cut Only 75 Cents.’ The barbers were two Italian men. It was the kind of barber shop that didn’t offer shaves, singes, shampoos, tonics, or scalp treatments. It only cut hair.

   There were Poles, Greeks, and Irishmen in Hell’s Kitchen. The cops were all Irish. There were Italians and Puerto Ricans. Everybody talked a foreign language. There were drivers, factory men, and longshoremen. There was stickball and stoopball on the streets. There were too many boys on scooters. There were too many girls in roller skates. There were too many tough kids. They didn’t carry weapons though, no guns, no knives. They thought they were tough enough to fight natural, with their hands. He had gotten into a beef with one of them, not even shaving age, with unexpected hands like boxing gloves, fingers as thick as thumbs. He hit the boy in the face, and nothing happened, except the second finger on his own hand got the worse of it. He backed away, smelling trouble. His hurt finger was still bent, a year later.

   When Stan Riddman walked past Bumpy, espresso in hand and biscotti in a bag, and went in the side door, Bumpy went looking for a car to steal. By the time Stan and Bettina were sitting opposite one another at Stan’s desk, biscotti spread out on the torn open bag, espresso still hot, Stan’s notes and Bettina’s notebook at hand, Bumpy was back in the parking lot with somebody else’s car. He would leave it behind when he left. He always did that. It would be cleaner than when he stole it, too. He didn’t like spending all day in a dirty car, so he always tidied it up first thing.

   Stan swept crumbs off his desk into the palm of his hand and shook them into the trashcan next to his desk. Sunshine poured in through the windows. Dust motes floated in the light. The cleaning lady was overdue.

   “’He looked like an old dead tree lying in the brush,’ was what one of Pollack’s neighbors said,” Stan said. “The man helped the police search the woods with a flashlight. ‘There was a little blood run down from the forehead, no other damage except for the neck swollen like a balloon,’” he read from his notes. “I talked to the undertaker up there who handled Pollack and the dead girl. He said Pollack died of a compound fracture of the skull and the girl died of a broken neck.”

   “What do our friends the police think?” Bettina asked.

   “They think he was a hell of an unhappy man, they think he had a hell of a lot to drink, and they think it was a hell of an accident. I talked to an Earl Finch up there. He was the patrolman on the scene.”

   “I knew he was dead from the look of him,” Patrolman Finch said. “It was so dark up there I don’t think I even covered him up.”   

   “Oh, hell!” Dr. William Abel said when he was led to the body of Jackson Pollack and looked at his broken head. He didn’t bother searching for a pulse. He put his Gladstone bag down and reached for a notepad.

   The East Hampton police report noted that Patrolman Finch radioed back to the station at 10:30 PM. It was less than twenty minutes after the accident. “Two dead at scene of accident,” was what he radioed. One girl was crushed by the upside down Oldsmobile, the other girl fractured her pelvis, and Jackson Pollack died of a head injury, was how the rest of the report put it. 

    Jackson Pollack was wearing “a black velvet shirt, gray pants, a brown belt, blue shorts, brown socks, no shoes, no jewelry, and no ID.”  Officer Finch knew who it was without having to look at the mangled face. He didn’t have to sniff out footsteps. He knew the Oldsmobile as well as anybody, having ticketed it a half-dozen times.

   “Who called in the accident?”

   “Three or four people. One of the neighbors said he heard the car barreling down the road and told his wife, ‘That fool isn’t going to make the curve.’ The other ones heard the car horn after the accident happened.” 

   “After, not before?”

   “Yeah, I guess the horn got stuck and started blowing and wouldn’t stop.” 

   “What bothered us was that horn blowing,” said one of the neighbors. “We jumped in the car.” They drove to the crash. “There wasn’t anyone around, just this girl with her head toward that piled-in car and blood coming out of her scalp. We had to holler at her with the horn blaring.”

   “It sounds like a small town. What is Springs like?” Bettina asked.

   “It’s a small town,” Stan said. “It’s sort of a thumb of land stuck out into a bay, so there’s water on three sides. There’s a lot of land and scattered houses in the middle of nothing there. The locals call themselves Bonackers.”

   “I’m going to be a Bonacker same as you some day,” Jackson Pollack declared to George Sid Miller one day, reaching for a beer at the Joe Loris bar in the East Hampton Hotel. “You live  long enough you’ll get ‘er done,” George Sid Miller said. “You only got to wait a hundred years and three or four generations.” It was something he had been telling other barflies since he started drinking at Joe Loris. He never got tired of talking about it.

   “Everybody says he drank phenomenal amounts of beer,” Stan said. “They say it had been going on for about four years. Before that he’d been good, although he seems to have always drunk plenty. One of his neighbors said if he hadn’t killed himself in that car, he would have killed himself with drink, sooner rather than later.”

   “How about the car? Did anybody check to see if it had been tampered with?”

   “No, it was turned over, busted, and a wrecker hauled it away first thing. It wasn’t the first car he had driven into a tree, either, He had a Caddy, did it about five years earlier. I talked to a Jim Brooks, one of his friends. He said, ‘I expected him to kill himself in an automobile, and I knew he wanted not to do it alone.’’’

   “So, he was suicidal?”

   “Not that anyone said so, but some of them said he was self-destructive. They seemed to think there was a difference. One guy at Jungle Pete’s said Pollack was too much of a coward to kill himself.”

   “What is Jungle Pete’s?” Bettina asked.

   “A tavern, restaurant, and social club, all wrapped up in one dump. It’s rough around the edges.”

   “He came to my restaurant every day for eggs and home fries, toast and coffee,” said Nina Federico at Jungle Pete’s. “He bought a second-hand bike and would come over evenings on the bike for beers. He didn’t always get home on the bike, though.”

   “There’s a married couple who live right there behind Jungle Pete’s,” Stan said. “Whenever Nina gave them the high sign they would take him home. The beer is a nickel. I spent some of my nickels there. The locals bring their kids in their pajamas, the kids fall asleep on the floor, and their parents dance and party all night.”

   “It sounds like a house party,” Bettina said. “What was their house like there in Springs?”

   “There was a lot of paint in a studio, a converted barn, it looked like to me, but you wouldn’t know he was a famous artist by his house, even though I found out he was famous enough that the New York Times ran the story of his death on the front page.”

   “Did he have any problems in the neighborhood?”

   “No real trouble, not that way. He seems to have had a soft spot for kids and dogs. Somebody said he had a pet crow for a while. One lady said he was an innocent, childlike person, except when he was in a car. Everybody had seen him falling down drunk, more than once. I talked to a doctor neighbor of his who said Pollack would put away two, three cases of beer when he was on a bender.”

   “He must have worn out a path to the toilet,” Bettina said. 

   “Found Jackson Pollack outside on the sidewalk lying down,” reported the East Hampton police blotter more than once. They propped him up on his bicycle and sent him home more than once. If he didn’t get home they looked for him in the morning in ditches along the road.

   “He could be mean, got into fights, broke his ankle just a few years ago fighting with some other artist, but I didn’t talk to anybody who disliked him, although not everybody liked him. There were more people than not who felt sorry for him. I almost felt sorry for him by the time I left.”

   “Did anything look funny about the crash?” Bettina asked.

   “Not to anybody up there,” Stan said. “Not to me, either. They seemed surprised it happened but not surprised at the same time. It was like they had been making book on it happening.”

   Getting comfortable in his stolen car Bumpy Williams cracked open an All-Negro Comics and balanced it on the steering wheel. Ace Harlem was the private detective of the cover story and the bad guys were zoot-suited back alley muggers. He was planning on re-reading  “Sugarfoot,” which was about the traveling musicians Sugarfoot and Snake Oil on the prowl for a farmer’s daughter.

   He had brought a double-decker sandwich and a thermos of coffee with him. He peeled back the parchment paper the sandwich was wrapped in and spread it out on his lap. He poured a cup of coffee and put the cup on top of the dashboard. It was after two o’clock when he finished eating and flicking crumbs out of the car. “Remember – Crime Doesn’t Pay, Kids!” Ace Harlem admonished on the back cover of the comic book. Bumpy folded it and slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket.

   “While you were re-discovering that Pollack drank like a fish and finding out what he was wearing when he died, I talked to the death-car girl,” Bettina said. “Maybe everybody up in Springs expected or didn’t expect something like that accident to happen, but she says it wasn’t an accident. She says Jackson Pollack deliberately swerved off the road and accelerated into the oak tree he smashed into.”

   “She thinks he was committing suicide?”

   “No,” Bettina said. “She calls it his death-day.”

   “What’s the difference?”

   “At the moment he died I believe his soul came into my body,” Ruth Kligman explained to Bettina. “When I was convalescing in the hospital, his spirit came and visited me. I’m like Cleopatra and he was like Marc Anthony. He was a very deep soul mate. The minute I met him I felt I had known him for years.” The minute Ruth met Jackson they were off to the races. Only Ruth believed there would be a winner. Jackson Pollack knew there was poison in the gravy.

   “He visited her?”

   “His ghost.”

   “You don’t believe any of that any more than I do, do you Betty?”

   “No,” she said. “But she was right there, and she believes he deliberately drove off the road.”

   “There were no skid marks, on or off the road, according to the police report,” Stan said. “The police sergeant I talked to estimates he was going at least seventy when he hit the tree.” The Oldsmobile fishtailed off the road almost two hundred feet through underbrush before colliding with the guts of the forest, pivoting, going end over, a hubcap rolling away, empty cans of Rheingold flying into the dark. Three of the cans landed upright in a staggered row, like three blind mice.

   “If we take it for granted it wasn’t an accident, and we take it for granted he wasn’t trying to commit suicide, what do we have?” Stan asked.

   “We have him driving into the tree on purpose, but not for any suicidal reason,” Betty said.

   “If that’s what we have, that’s crazy. Why would he do that?”

   “We’ve got to go with whatever we have is what we have. Maybe somebody brainwashed him into doing it.”

   Stan gave it some thought. “If that’s what we’ve got, then who would have done the brainwashing? Who had the means and opportunity to lead Jackson Pollack down that path? I can’t see that getting done out there in Springs.”

   “Barney Newman told us he had been in and out of therapy for a long time,” Bettina said. “We could start with his doctor. We know Pollack came into the city often, did business with his dealers, went drinking with his pals at the Cedar Tavern, and ran around with his girlfriend. I would expect his doctor to be here in the city if he’s anywhere.”

   “All right, let’s find out who he was, try to get a line on him.”

   “Does that mean me?”

   “That’s why you make the big bucks,” Stan said.

   “When did that happen?” Bettina asked.

   At the end of the day, outside Stan’s apartment, Bumpy found a phone booth and called in his day of watching the detective. “He didn’t do nothing all day. He’s got some girl, probably his office girl, and a Jew man came and went. Other than that, he was in the office all day and then went home. I didn’t see a wife, but he’s got a little girl. That’s it, ain’t no more. I’m gonna head to the barbershop, get a wig chop, maybe stop up at Joe Wells’ for some fried chicken and waffles.” 

   Wells’ Restaurant, sometimes an eatery, sometimes a nightclub, was on Seventh Avenue between 132^ndand 133^rd. Bumpy Williams was from South Carolina but had grown up and still lived on 132^nd Street. He lived on the top floor of a brownstone. Benta’s Funeral Home was on both the first and parlor floors of the building. 

   “We like your looks,” they said when they rented the rooms to him after the war. “The crow’s nest is yours.” He had lived there ever since, ever since 1946. He kept his rooms as neat as he kept stolen cars.

   Benta’s buried famous, infamous, and nobody Negro’s. If you had plenty of dead presidents, you could order a gold, green, or red hearse, with a colored coffin to match. If you were short on folding money, George Benta made all the arrangements. Nobody was ever turned away. Everybody got to meet their maker with a modicum of dignity.

   It wasn’t that the funeral director was over generous. Going up the stairs one day Bumpy heard George behind him. “Don’t forget to turn that hall light off when you turn in. My name is George Benta, not Thomas Edison.” George wasn’t a stingy man. He was a frugal man. Bumpy had no problem with that.

   “Stop by the shop and we’ll pay you for the day,” the soft voice on the other end of the line said. “The Queen says it best we pay you by the day. She says there’s something queer going on, so we’ll keep it close. We maybe will need you again the next couple of days.”  

   Queenie Johnson ran the numbers in Harlem. She was the uptown arm of Umberto “Albert”  Anastasia’s Italian Hand. Bumpy knew if he was doing work for her, he was doing work for them. That’s where the money came from.  “The Mad Hatter says there’s no such thing as good money or bad money,” Queenie said one day when they were smoking on a stoop after Bumpy had come back from making a delivery to her runners and controllers. “There’s just money, is what Albert says.”

   Benta’s had buried Alain Locke, a big-time Negro, two years ago. W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Johnson, and Paul Robeson’s widow all came and paid their respects. Nobody could find a place to park. Nobody stayed over long. There wasn’t enough standing room to stand. The stale air in the grieving chapel started to run out. Bumpy was standing at the front door with George after it was all over, and the casket coach was pulling away. George was in his work clothes, a long coat, pinstripes, and gray gloves. His wife, Pearl, was accompanying the funeral procession. 

   “Do you know that Alain Locke kept sperm samples from all his man lovers in a small box? One of them tried to slip it into the coffin. I slapped his hand away. I wouldn’t touch that box, though, not on your life.” 

    Bumpy looked down the street at the departing train of black cars, imagining them to be a line of wiggling sperm.

   “You pay me what you said, I’ll lean on a light pole every day of the week,” he said to Queenie’s man before hanging up. “I’ll check with you in the morning. King Cole is supposed to be in town for that new TV show he’s doing, and word is he might be singing it up at the supper club tonight.”

   Bumpy replaced the receiver, stuck two fingers into his mouth, and whistled up a cab.

   “Harlem,” he said, getting in beside the driver. He knew sitting up front was like going to an afternoon matinee and sitting next to the only other person at the movies, but he liked riding shotgun. He was looking forward to seeing a show tonight. His favorite summer show was the Bums at Ebbets Field. He and a friend liked sitting in the lower section along the third base line, except Bumpy’s favorite place to park his behind was the concrete stairs between the seats. As soon as he could he sat there. The view was the best. There were never any fat heads or funny hats in front of him. Hardly anybody except the ushers complained. When they did he gave them a hard look with his indifferent green eyes.

   “Big night tonight. Nat King Cole is in town.”

   “Never heard of him, pal,” the cabbie said.

   “When I perform it’s like sitting down at my piano and telling fairy stories,” Nat King Cole said before a show in Birmingham, Alabama.

    It was five months since he had been attacked in Birmingham, during a show, when half-a-dozen white men jumped over the footlights and rushed him, grabbing his legs, wrenching his back, taking him down to the floor of the stage before the police were able to break up the melee and the baritone with perfect pitch was able to go back to telling fairy stories.

   “Alabama is no place for immoral nigger rock and roll music,” Willie Hinson said the next morning standing in front of the storefront office of the White Citizen’s Council. He had a slight sunburn lighting up his freckles and was wearing a tie. Bumpy had heard it all before. He had already killed one white man. It had not been an accident. He thought he might have to kill another one someday, if not for any particular reason, then on principle alone.

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

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

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

By Ed Staskus

   It was a hot and humid day. The city as far as the eye could see smelled bad. The sky was dotted with dull clouds. The old hot dog Ezra Aaronson had wolfed down for breakfast was giving his stomach trouble. On top of that, the bunion topping his left big toe was throbbing in the new shoes he had forgotten to stretch beforehand. 

   It was a bad day to be having a bad day but that’s what it was turning into. Now the other penny was dropping. One of them was big and looked mean. The other one was smaller and looked meaner. He kept his eyes on the big bad penny. He kept his sense of preservation on the small bad penny. Ezra was sure nobody else was behind him to trip him up but running fast and far was going to be a problem with his bunion. He kept his hands at his sides, his right hand balled into a fist.

   “You can forget about that roll of pennies in your hand,” said the small bad man next to Big Paulie. 

   Luca Gravano was Big Paulie. He wasn’t tall as in tall. Instead, he was all around big, a dark suit, dark tie, and a white shirt. His face was sweaty and pockmarked. He wore browline glasses. The lenses looked like they were smeared with a thin film of Vaseline. His brown eyes were slippery behind the glasses. It was no picnic trying to focus on them. His shoes were spit shined. He stank of five-and-ten store cologne.

   “They’re not Lincoln’s,” Ezra said. “They’re Jefferson’s.” He could use a lucky penny. A rolled-up copy of the Declaration of Independence wasn’t going to get it done. Maybe Honest Abe might come around the corner with the axe he used to spilt logs back in the day. Maybe he could help. Ezra wasn’t going to hold his breath.

   “OK, let’s cut the crap,” Big Paulie said. “We ain’t going to get up to anything here, broad daylight, all these guys around, left and right.”  He waved a beefy hand over his shoulder. “We just wanna know what it is you wanna know.”

   Ezra looked past the big man. On the finger pier side of where he was a freighter lay at rest Hemp slings were lifting swaying pallets off the boat. In the distance he could see the Statue of Liberty. On the dockside was a two-story brick building. A loose group of longshoremen was coming their way, baling hooks swinging on their belts. They would be DD&B if anything did get up to something. 

   “I don’t know nothing about it,” they would all say, deaf, dumb, and blind after it was all said and done. But they might be the smoke screen Ezra needed to be on his way. He could see plainly enough he needed a way out.

   “I’m trying to get a line on Tommy Dunn,” Ezra lied. He never told anybody what he was really working on. He wasn’t working on these two goons. Why were they getting in his face?

   “Never heard of him,” Big Paulie’s small man said.

   “Fair enough,” Ezra said.

   “You a private dick?” Big Paulie asked.

   “Yeah.” 

   “Who you work for?” the small man asked. He had yellow fingernails and sharp front teeth. He wore a felt pork pie hat. He was in shirtsleeves. There were spots of spaghetti sauce on the pocket on the front of his shirt.

   “Ace Detectives,” Ezra lied again.

   “OK, I’ve heard of them.”

   “Best you beat feet,” Big Paulie said, staring at Ezra. It was a fixed look. “Tough Tony don’t like nobody nosing around for no good reason, know what I mean?”

   “I take your meaning,” Ezra said. 

   “Don’t forget what I said here today.”

    Ezra took a step back, smiling like warm milk, and walked away in stride with the group of longshoremen going his way. He hated shucking and jiving, but he knew enough to hedge his bets. The rackets ran the shaping-up, the loading, and the quickie strikes. They hired you for the day if you were willing to kick back part of your day’s pay. At the shape-up you let them know you were willing to play ball by putting a toothpick behind your ear or wearing a red scarf or whatever it was they wanted to see. If they liked you they saw it.

   They controlled the cargo theft, the back-door money stevedores paid to keep the peace, and the shylocking from one end of Red Hook to the other end. They didn’t steal everything, although they tried. The unions were hoodlums. The businessmen were hoodlums. The pols were hoodlums. The whole business was crooked left and right and down the middle.

   The Waterfront Commission hadn’t gotten much done since they got started, even though the State of New York and the Congress of the United States had gotten on board in thought and word. It was taking time finding the gang plank leading to deeds. It was just two-some years ago on Christmas week when a new union full of do-gooder ideas butted heads with the ILA. Tough Tony flooded the streets with the faithful. It took hundreds of club-swinging policemen from four boroughs to break up the riot at the Port of New York. Staten Island sat the melee out. In the end, only a dozen men were sent to Riker’s Island while emergency rooms filled up and mob rule continued to rule the roost on the docks.

   Ezra put the roll of nickels back in his pants pocket. He walked the length of the wire fence to the gate. Through the gate he turned his back on the Buttermilk Channel. He couldn’t settle himself down, a sinking feeling in his gut making him feel queasy. Red Hook was surrounded by water on three sides. A longshoreman leaning on a shadow stared at him. He crossed the street into the neighborhood. The houses, six-story brick apartment buildings, were less than twenty years old, but they had already gone seedy.

   “I need a drink bad,” he said to himself.

   Most days Ezra ran on caffeine and nicotine. Most nights he ran on alcohol and nicotine. Even though it was only late morning, today wasn’t most days. He found a bar and grill at the corner of Court Street and Hamilton Avenue. Sitting down at the bar he ordered a shot and a chaser. He looked up at the bartender. The man was broad and wearing a bow tie. He looked like a king-size mattress wearing a bow tie. 

   “What have you got on tap?” Ezra asked.

   “Ballantine, Schlitz, Rheingold.”

   Two longshoremen sat on stools a couple of stools away. Bottles of beer, most of them empty, squatted in front of them. Neither man had a glass. They ate pickles from a jar. The TV on a shelf behind the bar was on, although the sound had been turned down to nothing. A beer commercial was running. It was a ticker tape parade through Times Square, but instead of war heroes or celebrities everybody in the parade was a bottle of Rheingold. 

   “Nobody knew what that was about,” said one of the longshoremen, pulling a pack of Lucky Strikes out of his shirt pocket. The bartender knew what they were talking about. Ezra didn’t have a clue.

   “I got no trouble,” the other one said. “Me, I support my family. It’s good work, keeps me out of trouble. I got my old lady and three kids.”

   “Nothing changes,” the Lucky Strike man said lighting his cigarette. “You just live every day as if it’s your last.”

    “I’ll have that Rheingold now,” Ezra said after throwing his shot back, feeling it burn going down his throat. “Make sure the glass is as cold as can be.”

   “Sure thing, bud,” the man mattress said.

Photograph by Sam Falk.

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, 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