By Ed Staskus

   When Oliver’s neighbors started seeing the ghost of the Godfather, the one and only, roaming the streets of Canterbury Crossing at night, Oliver assumed they had been watching too many reruns of the gangster saga. But when a pack 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 Monster Hunter of Lake County. He had been hunting them for more than two years, ever since he turned six. At first, he went at it alone, but his sister Emma quickly 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 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 Godfather, about how the spirit 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 Goo Goo Godzilla attacked it. “Just make it go someplace else, anyplace other than our backyards,” they said.

   That night, when everybody’s TV’s were off, the children tucked in and the adults snoring their heads off, Oliver and Emma snuck out of the house. They slipped through the sliding back door so that nothing would slam shut 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.

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

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

   “That’s the gangsters, 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 in San Francisco, New Orleans, New York City, and everywhere else, who they thought would 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. Some 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. She kept them well hidden. She was a sassy pre-teen. Her mom 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 Florida were on the right track banning books and wanted to move to the Sunshine State.

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

   “They smell bad because so many politicians live in Florida,” 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 and other people unhappy. They wouldn’t give you the skin off a grape unless there was something in it for them.”

  Just then the Godfather unfurled like a snake from behind a utility pole.  Emma reached into her back pocket and pulled out the jackknife she always kept handy. The Godfather looked at it and snorted.

   “What are you worried about?” he said. “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.”

   “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”

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

  “I didn’t say I didn’t like them,” the Godfather said. ”I liked them well enough but I’m not going to say I want 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 we 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, and then the small fry, 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? What a blowhard! He was as bad as a Florida politician.

   “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 witch’s toes. He was getting tired of the Godfather explaining and complaining. He wasn’t the Complaint Desk of Lake County. He didn’t care about crocodile 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 said. 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 S. 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 roundness. 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 fearful or angry. He had been dead a long time and knew the score. He waited for the show to start.

   An oily plume of smoke seeped up from a sewer grate at the Godfather’s feet. Before long he was engulfed by the smoke. 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 packages 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 at http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

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Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CVDP8B58

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Two hired guns from Montreal. One rookie RCMP constable stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication