By Ed Staskus

   “Don’t you get scared fighting all those monsters?” Tommy One Shoe asked Oliver, who was chewing on a blade of grass. It tasted like somebody’s bare foot. He spit it out.

   Whenever there was monster trouble, and somebody asked who they should call for help, Oliver was at the top of the Help Wanted list. Tommy was one of his best friends. Emma and Dorothy were with them. Emma was Oliver’s older sister and right-hand man. Dorothy was Tommy’s next-door best friend. They all went to the same school, Perry Elementary, except they didn’t go to school in the summertime.

   It was the morning of the Fourth of July. The day had been a federal holiday since 1941, but the tradition of Independence Day went back to the 18th century and the American Revolution. The Continental Congress voted for independence 246 years ago and two days later rolled out the red carpet for the Declaration of Independence. Since then, there had been parades, concerts, and fireworks galore to celebrate the big day. 

   Oliver mulled over Tommy’s question. “If I thought about it too much you bet I would be scared,” he said. “I leave the thinking to Emma. Most of the time there’s too much going on to be scared, anyway. The best thing to do is go into action. If you stand around too long your worst fears can come true any second.”

   “I’m more scared of shots than I am of Dracula,” Tommy said. “I’m even more scared in the doctor’s office. They make you wait forever for the shot.”

   They were at Indian Point Park, just minutes from where they lived. Oliver and Emma lived in the Canterbury Crossing Condominiums while Tommy and Dorothy lived in the Pebble Creek Crossing Condominiums, They had walked to the park. It was a warm sunny day. They were where the Grand River and Paine Creek bumped into each other. There was a totem stone nearby. The names of boys who went to Charles Lyman’s military camp there a hundred years earlier were carved into the stone. The encampment back then was called Camp Wissolohichan. Nobody knew how to pronounce it.

   “I love your name,” Emma said to Dorothy.

   “I hate it,” Dorothy said. “My mom saw some old movie about a little girl who fought witches and flying monkeys. The girls name was Dorothy. My mom said she was the bravest girl in the world and so she named me after her.”

   “Do you have a nickname,” Emma asked. “I could call you that.”

   “No, but you can call me Dottie, which is what everybody else calls me.”

   “I have an uncle who changed his name when he was nine years old.”

   “I never heard of anybody nine years old being allowed to do that,” Dottie said.

   “He did and he made it stick,” Emma said. “His name was Harold. Everybody called him Hal. One day he told everybody they had to start calling him by his new name if they wanted to stay friends with him.When they asked he told them he had changed his name to Magnus. After that everybody called him Mags. He didn’t like it when he found out Mags was a girl’s name. He changed it again to William. Everybody called him Billy after that.”

   “My mom would kill me if I tried to change my name,” Dottie said. Emma nodded solemnly in agreement. She knew full well how serious adults could be, especially her mother.

   “What if a monster tried to kill you?” Tommy asked Oliver.

   “I would tell them it’s not allowed,” Oliver said. “They can try to run away, but no killing.”

   “What if they don’t listen?”

   “I have my ways of making them listen. If they don’t, I destroy them. If I have to, I destroy them twice. After I do that they never come back.”

   “What are you doing later on?” Tommy asked.

   “We’re having a barbeque,” Oliver said. Americans eat almost two hundred million hot dogs every Fourth of July. “My dad is doing burgers and dogs.” Their mother didn’t cook anything unless it was a pasta salad. “You and Dottie are both coming over, don’t you remember?”

   “Oh yeah, sure,” Tommy said, racking his memory. He was called One Shoe because he forgot his second shoe one morning on the way to school and spent the rest of the day limping around in the other shoe, dragging his bare sock behind him, wearing a hole out in it.

   “Did you know that some of the soldiers who were in the Revolutionary War didn’t have shoes, not even one shoe, and they wore rags for socks?” Oliver asked Tommy.

   “What do you mean? How could that be?” It still got on Tommy’s nerves whenever anybody even hinted at his one shoe false step. “How do you know that?”

   “Our teacher told us all about it, about how some of the soldiers froze at Valley Forge and how their toes fell off.”

   “My dad says we are free because of Valley Forge,” Tommy said. “He calls it the War of Independence. He was in Afghanistan when he was in the army before I was born. He says it was awful, but it was something that had to be done.”

   “Does he say why?”

   “No, he never talks about why. I asked him if he was scared. He said yes, but the other side of fear is freedom, which is the side we want to be on, whatever that means.”

   Oliver and Tommy thought about what it might mean but gave up. They eye-balled a river otter swimming past them. The spring thaw had resulted in flooding but there hadn’t been any heavy rain since mid-May. The water was like a quiet country road. The otter took its time. They took their time watching it.

   “We otter get going,” Oliver joked.

   “Are your relatives going to be at the barbeque?” Tommy asked as they walked up a trail to the bluffs overlooking the Grand River.

   “Yeah,” Oliver said.

   “Oh, man, does that mean we have to do crafts?” Tommy asked. Oliver’s relatives always brought scissors and glue. Everybody who was a child had to join in. He wasn’t an arts and crafts boy. He liked to eat, though.

   Oliver and Emma’s relatives coming to their Fourth of July barbeque were from their mother’s side. They lived nearby. There were two sisters and their husbands. One of the husbands drove a Jeep and repaired car washes. The other man drove a RAM pick-up and was the silent type. He usually had his face in his cellphone. Both men were conservative family men. There were four grown-up children, all girls, all in their early 20s. All of the young women had a lazy Susan of boyfriends.

   After they watched house flies getting dizzy at the sight of the barbeque buffet, then eating their fill when their turn came, and later throwing a Frisbee back and forth for an hour, afterwards taking a quick nap, when the long day finally settled into dusk Oliver, Emma, Tommy, and Dottie walked to the Madison Avenue Estates. Their friend Jimmy lived there and had a box of bottle rockets ready to go.

   “It’s like an exploding Christmas,” Dottie said, watching the rockets’ red glare in the night sky.

    “Independence Day is the best day ever,” Emma said.

     “You bet it is,” Tommy One Shoe said. “Today is the day Will Smith saved us from the aliens.”

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

“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. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye. The 1956 World Series. President Eisenhower at the opening game. A killer in the dugout.