Back of the Black Hand

Back of the Black Hand

By Ed Staskus

   When Oliver’s neighbors started seeing the ghost of Marlon Brando, the Godfather, who nobody realized was actually the one and only real-life Vito Corleone, roaming the streets of Canterbury Crossing at night, Oliver assumed they had been watching too many reruns of the crime saga on TV. But when a gaggle of them trooped into his family’s living room and asked to see him about the sightings, asking him to make their streets safe again, it was an offer he could not refuse.

   Oliver was the Unofficial Monster Hunter of Lake County. He had been at the monster hunting business for more than two years, ever since he turned six. At first, he went at it alone, but his sister Emma soon became his right-hand man. She wasn’t as brave as him, but she was smarter.

   “Always be smarter than the people who hire you,” she told Oliver.

   “But nobody hires us,” Oliver said. “We’re volunteers.”

   “You know what I mean,” she said. 

   “What about bravery?” he asked.

   “There’s a fine line between bravery and stupidity.”

   Oliver knew when not to argue with Emma. He wanted to say stupidity was the fashion of the day but that bravery never went out of style. He wanted to say something along those lines but didn’t. He knew without saying so it was bravery that always paid off, but he was going to wait for another day to say so. After the neighbors had voiced their concerns about the ghost, about how it was scaring dogs and children, dragging chains behind it that kept everybody awake at night, Oliver agreed to help.

   “I can’t make any promises,” he said. They were not put off. They had seen him in action before. They had seen him save the Perry Nuclear Power Plant when Godzilla’s grandson Goo Goo attacked it. “Just make it go someplace else, anyplace other than our backyards,” the neighbors all said.

   That night, when everybody’s TV’s were off and the adults were snoring their heads off, Oliver and Emma snuck out of the house. They slipped through the sliding back door so that nothing would slam in their faces. It was as dark as drawing a blank. Oliver flipped on the flashlight he had brought and cast its beam far and wide. The Godfather was nowhere in sight. They went looking for him.

   Emma didn’t like looking for the Black Hand when she couldn’t even see the back of her hand, and she said so when Oliver swung his flashlight in her direction.

   “What’s the Black Hand?” Oliver asked. 

   “That’s the mob,” Emma said. ”At least, that’s what everybody used to call it, before calling it the Mafia.”

   The Black Hand went back more than two hundred years when some Sicilian immigrants learned to write English and started sending extortion letters to anybody and everybody in San Francisco, New Orleans, New York City, and everywhere else, who they thought might pay up. They threatened arson and murder. They signed their letters with pictures of a black hand and a dagger. If they thought you needed extra convincing, the dagger was drawn dripping with blood.

   “How do you know all that?” Oliver asked. 

   “I read it in a book,” Emma said. 

   She read books morning noon and night, scores of them. Oliver was like his father. He never read books unless he absolutely had to. Most of Emma’s books, like the one about the Mafia, she had gotten from the Perry Public Library. Her parents didn’t know anything about those books. She kept them well hidden. Her mother had forbidden her to read certain books. She had been a corporate lawyer and knew all books except law books were full of lies. When Emma explained they were living in Ohio, not Florida, her mom gave her a sharp look. She thought libraries in the southlands were on the right track banning books. She wanted to move to the Sunshine State.

   “I don’t want to go back there,” Emma said. She was a sassy pre-teen. “It was a hundred degrees every day the week we went to Disney World and the sewers smelled bad.”

   “They smell bad because crooks live in sewers,” Oliver said. “When they move to a swamp they think they’ve come up in the world. They’re after happy money, the kind that makes only them happy. They wouldn’t give you the skin off a grape unless there was something in it for them.”

  Just then the Godfather uncoiled like a snake from behind a utility pole.  Emma reached into her back pocket and pulled out her steady eddy jackknife. She always kept it handy when she and Oliver were on a job. The Godfather looked at it and snorted.

   “What are you worried about?” the mobster sneered. “If I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead already.”

   “Oh,” she said. “I guess you’re right Mr. Godfather.”

   “You can call me Vito,” he said. 

   “I thought you were Marlon Brando, Mr. Vito.”

   “Don’t talk about any stinking actors to my face,” he snapped. “If you do you will sink with the fishes.”

   “I thought it was swim with the fishes.”

   “In my world, bambino, it is sink like cement, fish or no fish.”

   “Don’t you like the movies about you?”

  “I didn’t say I don’t like them,” the Godfather said. ”I like them well enough but I’m not going to cuddle up and kiss them. That Marlon Brando, I will tell you, I would slap his face into hamburger meat if he was still around.”

   “What are you doing in our neighborhood?” Oliver interrupted.

   “I’m trying to find out where it all went wrong,” the Godfather said. “We used to make big money from the protection rackets, extortion, booze, drugs, gambling, and girls. When I heard it was all gone I couldn’t believe it. I came back, went to the top cities, Atlantic City, Las Vegas, like that, and then the small towns, and I finally landed here, which is just about as nowhere as it gets.” 

   Oliver and Emma exchanged looks. What did he know about Perry, Ohio? What a blowhard!

   “What did you find out?” Oliver asked.

   “I found out nobody pays protection money to nobody anymore. Extortion is a lost cause. Booze, drugs, and gambling have all become legal, and free sex killed the girlie trade. There’s never a dame around when you hit the skids.”

   “When are you leaving?” Oliver interrupted again. The night was getting cold as a witch’s big toe. He was getting tired of the Godfather explaining and complaining. He wasn’t the Complaint Desk of Lake County. He didn’t care about tears from any washed-up crime lord. He didn’t care if it was Marlon Brando or Vito Corleone. Whatever his name was he had to go before he got up to any more shenanigans.

   “I don’t know that I will be leaving,” the Godfather retorted. He was starting to look prim and proper, like he might even pay his property taxes. “Where I live now makes me hot under the collar. I saw a nice cemetery down the road. There were lots of trees to keep me cool. I might move there.” The cemetery was the Perry Cemetery, less than a mile away. Some of the earliest settlers from the early 1800s were buried there, like the farmer Ezra Beebe.

   When Ezra Beebe heard the Godfather say he might move in, he got busy and dug himself out of his grave. He marched down South Ridge Rd. to the Canterbury Crossings Condominiums. He took a right at the entrance and stopped where Oliver, Emma, and the Godfather were. He ignored Oliver and Emma. He marched up to the Godfather. He had a three-pound bag of salt with him. He poured it out at the Godfather’s feet, making a circle. When the gangster tried to step over the circle of salt, he found out he couldn’t. He was trapped inside the circle. Ezra tossed handfuls of sage on the ground and set it on fire. It didn’t smell bad, except to the Godfather, who started wheezing and coughing.

   “I am cleansing this neighborhood,” Ezra said. “All evil spirits must leave.” No sooner did he say what he had to say than he turned his back on the Godfather, crossing his arms over his chest, looking into the distance. He didn’t look angry or fearful. He had been dead a long time and knew the score. He knew the score was all zero’s. He waited for the show.

   An oily plume of smoke seeped up from a sewer grate at the Godfather’s feet. Before long he was engulfed by the smoke. Emma walked around the column of smoke, peering into it. When the air cleared, the Godfather was gone.

   “He ain’t coming back any time soon,“ Ezra said, leaving as quietly as he had come.

   “Thank goodness he showed up,” Emma exclaimed. “I don’t know what we could have done if he hadn’t.”

  Oliver pointed to the bags of salt and sage he had brought with him. “I would have thought of something,” 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. 

A New Thriller by Ed Staskus

“Cross Walk“

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

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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 dugout.