Out of Time

Out of Time

By Ed Staskus

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

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

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

   The front of his white shirt, open at the neck, was a blob of red. Some of the red was damp while the edges of the blob had gone dull. Flies were loitering around him. The boys jumped when the dead man moaned.

   “Do you need some help?” Artie asked

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

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

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

   “Who is he?” Benas asked. He had never seen him in their neighborhood before.

   “He was a hoodlum.”

   “Did you shoot him?”

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

   “What’s the big wheel?”

   “Never mind kid.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “Nobody lives here except me,” she said.

   “Was that man your boyfriend?” Benas asked.

   “Yes, but he died years ago. I don’t know who that is lying half on the sidewalk and half on the street. It looks like he’s got a free pass to get into the Glenville Cemetery.”

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

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

   She turned to my friend. “Isn’t your name Arturas?” she asked.

   “Yes, how did you know?”

   “Do you know your name means ‘Gift of God’?”

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

   “I know everybody’s names, everybody in this neighborhood, everybody on their way to the boneyard, where everybody is going, sooner or later, following the track of their hollow footsteps. Forgiveness of sins and resurrection of the flesh.” Artie’s eyes got wide. Benas started getting spooked. A crow on top of the roof cawed three times.

  “What was your friend’s name?” Artie asked.

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

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

   He could talk well enough but his chest wasn’t rising and falling and his words were muffled. His eyes were like marbles. They didn’t expect him to stand up and walk away. When Benas glanced at him again he went blurry like there was a wet moth flapping its wings between them, even though it wasn’t raining, yet. A dog barked in a backyard on Coronado Ave.

   A four-door Oldsmobile raced down St. Clair Ave. “What the hell does he think he’s doing,” one of the policemen groused. No one saw the big car go past. It was like trying to see a falling star during the day. Artie said it was his Uncle Gediminas. Most of the Lithuanians in Cleveland lived in Glenville, although all of them were moving to North Collinwood. Benas had heard his father tell his mother one night they would have to start looking for a new house soon, or urban renewal would make the family home worthless. Benas didn’t know what urban renewal meant, although it sounded bad. He knew worthless meant bad. Uncle Gediminas was a bitesize man. He was an accountant and could afford a new car whenever he wanted, even though he unfailingly bought used cars that burned oil. “He’s always yelling at his kids,” Artie said, “and all his kids are afraid of him. He bosses them around day and night.” 

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

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

   “I don’t think he has much time left even though the policeman said he’s already dead. Let’s wait. I don’t want to sneak away.”

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

   “Do you believe in Heaven?” Artie asked.

   “I believe in Hell,” the dead man said.

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

   Benas and Artie were soaking wet in a minute of rain. They got chilled and goosebumps covered their arms and legs. Artie ran home down Coronado Ave. and Benas ran home down Bartfield Ave. Even though it was storming and had gotten dark, none of the houses were lit up. They were all dark. Benas’s front door was locked. He ran to the back door. It was locked. He knocked but nobody came to the door. He kicked at it but still nobody came to let him in. He went into the backyard to the storm doors. They were never locked. One of the doors had a handle. He pulled the door open.

   The concrete steps led to the cellar. They were slippery with slime. It was where their father told them they had to go in case there was a tornado. He told them about the last one in Cleveland in 1953 that killed nine people, injured three hundred, and left two hundred homeless when their homes were blown away. “The cellar will protect us from high-speed winds and flying debris,” he said.

   They lived in a side-by-side Polish double that Benas’s parents bought on the cheap when they emigrated to the United States. A German widow lived on the other side of them. Her husband was dead and her children had moved away. She was alone in the world. In a week she would be a hundred years old and her solitude would be full-blown. She was sitting on a lawn chair in front of a small room in the middle of the basement. It was where she kept her canned goods. She kept carrots, radishes, and potatoes in bins. She was writing in a spiral-bound memo pad. Her memory was on the fritz. She taped pictures and wrote notes in her pad. There were pictures of Benas’s father, mother, brother, sister, and him, and their names in the pad. There were pictures of her fridge and stove and what they were called, which was fridge and stove. There were diagrams of all her rooms and everything in the rooms, what they were for and what they were called. There was a scrap of paper safety pinned to the front of her house dress. Her name, Agatha, was written on the paper in block letters.

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

   “Where is everybody?” he asked.

   “They are all upstairs They will be sorry if a tornado comes. I told them so, but they won’t listen.”

   He ran up the stairs to their kitchen. All the lights in the house were on. His brother and sister were arguing and wrestling on the living room floor while his parents watched the weatherman on the TV. They had a new Zenith, although the only time it worked right was when there was a clear sky. There was a clap of faraway thunder. The TV went fuzzy. He couldn’t understand a word the weatherman was saying.

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

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

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

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

   When the sun came out Benas ran down the street and found Artie on his way. They got their bikes and rode down Eddy Rd. and through Bratenahl to Gordon Park on the Lake Erie shore. They sat on the edge of a cliff on the edge of the lake and watched a rainbow float in the sky until it vanished off the face of the earth. 

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

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

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

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

Available at Amazon

Apple Books 
http://books.apple.com/us/book/id6502837788

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication