Cricket Hunters

by Jeremy Hepler

  Though massive surges of adrenaline were tracking through Parker’s veins as he raced to catch up with Abby, his fears of confrontation subsided. The chase was over. If Jose had really wanted to fight, to hurt, to maim, he wouldn’t have stayed in the car. He’d had plenty of time to get out and rush Parker in that lot. But he hadn’t. He’d simply laughed like someone watching a dog dosed with beer stumble around the backyard bumping into things. Maybe he was too high to give chase, or maybe he was waiting for a more isolated scenario where no one would be able to hear the commotion and call the police. Either way, or any other way, Parker didn’t care. For tonight, he believed Jose had just been fucking with them, teasing them, trying to torment them. Nevertheless, Parker proceeded with caution as he crisscrossed through the alleys and streets of Gateway searching for Abby.

  The starry, moon-bright night sky had taken over by the time he emerged from an alley onto Chaparral Street, Abby’s street, ten minutes later. The trip had taken twice as long as it should’ve because he’d looped back a few times, checking different routes he thought Abby might’ve taken to make sure she hadn’t crashed or been injured or something. Two houses from hers, he saw that her porch light was off, but her bike was lying in the center of the driveway on its side. He pedaled to the side of the house, and as he hopped off of Cel’s bike in front of the gate that led into Abby’s backyard, the scent of fresh cigarette smoke tickled his nose. He tried the gate but found it locked.

  “Abby,” he whispered forcefully.

  No response, so he tried again, a little louder.

  Seconds later, the gate flew open, and Abby hurled herself into him and wrapped her arms around his neck. She turned her head sideways and pressed her damp cheek on his neck and whimpered. She was trembling.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  Eventually, she pulled away and nodded. “Are you?”

  “Yeah.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest, careful to keep the glowing cherry away from her skin, and then nervously looked over his shoulder at the road. “We should go inside. What if he comes here?”

  Parker rubbed her upper arms as if trying to warm them. “Don’t worry. If he wanted to hurt us, he would’ve. He won’t come here. He was just trying to scare us.”

  Holding eye contact with him, she took a shaky puff off the cigarette and offered it to Parker. He partook and handed it back. She glanced over his shoulder again, her eyes darting left to right, scanning the road.

  “I’m going to put our bikes in the backyard just in case he drives by,” Parker said, hoping to somewhat mollify her.

  She puffed, blowing the smoke out of the side of her mouth to avoid assaulting Parker’s face with it. Pockets of crickets were singing somewhere in the alley behind the house. “I don’t really think that’ll matter. This is Oak Mott. Six degrees of everyone. I’m sure he already knows where we all live, anyway.”

  “Probably. But I don’t want to give him the chance to damage or steal them.” He took the cigarette from her, used it, passed it back, and then retrieved both bikes and rested them up against the back of the house under her bedroom window. “Besides.” He threw his hands out to his side as if he were a magician’s assistant displaying the bikes to an awestruck audience. “If you ever need to make a quick escape, just hop out the window and off you go on your fully fueled escape pod.”

  A flicker of a smile moved over Abby’s mouth. “You’re ridiculous.” She shook her head, then glanced back at the road again. “You want to come in for a minute? It’s probably been close to thirty minutes. We should call Nat and Omar.”

  He nodded, and after quickly going back and locking the gate, he met Abby on the back porch and followed her into the house through the sliding glass doors.

  In the kitchen, Abby grabbed the cordless phone off the receiver and dialed Natalie’s number while Parker made his way into the adjacent dining room. He sat across the table from Jeff who was spooning chocolate ice cream from the carton into his mouth. Jeff’s mouth was a sticky brown mess. Bart Simpson was perched on his lap, his spiky hair and button black eyes barely visible over the table top. Parker flashed Jeff a tight-lipped smile as Abby walked into the room and stopped behind his chair. The analog clock hanging on the faux-wood panel wall behind Jeff read ten after eight.

  “Hey, Nat. You guys make it home okay? Good. Yeah. Yeah. It followed us…No. No, we’re okay. Yeah. Yeah. No. He’s here with me and Jeff right now. Okay. I will. Okay. Bye.”

  Abby returned the phone to the receiver in the kitchen and then came back to the dining room. “They’re fine.”

  “Who?” Jeff asked with the spoon between his lips.

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Abby shot back. “Besides, it’s none of your business, twerp.” She pulled out the chair next to Parker and sat down. “She wants me to call her back after you let me know that you made it home okay, too.” Staring blankly at her brother, she sucked in a deep breath. Her shoulders rose and pinched inward as she inhaled, loosening her shirt to expose a long line of cleavage.

  Parker noticed but pretended not to when she pushed out the breath and her shoulders dropped. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “I just wish Cel hadn’t dragged us into all of this.” She shook her head. “We wouldn’t be running around scared all the time if it wasn’t for her stupid ass. She’s so fucking immature with all that magic shit.” She turned her attention to Parker and measured him, her dark eyes sliding back and forth across his. He knew she wanted validation, backing, and he gave it to her with a nod.

  “She’s not stupid,” Jeff said. “She saved me from that guy at the fair.”

  “She’s the reason that guy was after you in the first place. She stole his mom’s cat because she thought it had magic powers for God’s sake.” Abby put her palms on the table, squinted, and shook her head as though baffled at herself. “Why am I explaining myself to an eleven-year-old? You need to go to your room.”

  Jeff plucked the spoon out of his mouth. “I don’t want to.”

  “I don’t care.” Abby stood and pointed down the hall. “Go.”

  Focused on scraping ice cream from the carton wall, Jeff calmly replied, “No.”

  She marched over to him and grabbed him by the ear and pulled him to his feet like Ms. Bogan, the Oak Mott Grade School music teacher for five decades running, often did to disobedient students. He dropped the spoon on the table, and Bart toppled to the floor. “If you don’t stop, I’m telling mom.”

  “Go ahead.”

  He grabbed her wrist with both hands, and as she twisted his ear, three hard pounds sounded on the front door, and she froze.

  Parker jumped up.

  Jeff took advantage of his sister’s paralysis and knocked her hand away. “Get away from me,” he said, shoving her.

  “Shut up,” Parker ordered him in an angry whisper, glaring at him with narrowed eyes.

  Jeff and Abby eyed Parker. A look of terror haunted Abby’s eyes. Jeff appeared both shocked and confused by the ferocity behind Parker’s expression. “Why are you—”

  Abby pressed her hand over Jeff’s mouth, and Parker put his finger to his lips. “Shhhh.”

  Three more knocks.

  “No one ever knocks this late,” Abby whispered. “Do you think it’s Jose?”

  Parker shook his head. “No way he’d knock on your door. Could it be your mom? Maybe she forgot her key?”

  “She doesn’t get off until ten-thirty.”

  Two more knocks. “Abby! Jeff!”

  Abby’s eyes enlarged. “It’s my dad.”

  Jeff’s eyes suddenly filled with terror, mimicking his sister’s.

  “I know you’re in there!” The door knob jiggled. “It’s not right for your mom to leave you alone like this! Let me in!”

  “What are we going to do?” Abby whispered. She took her hand off of Jeff’s mouth. He scooped up Bart Simpson and pressed him tight against his chest.

  Parker held Abby’s gaze, h
is mind reeling, adrenaline coursing through his body like a raging river for the second time in an hour. Long seconds passed, the clock on the wall ticking like a doomsday countdown. When a series of slaps came from the sliding glass door followed a deep voice calling out Abby’s and Jeff’s names again, he flicked off the dining room light, and crouched low to avoid detection through the kitchen window. Then he snuck into the kitchen, snagged the cordless phone, and hurried back. “Is there anywhere we can hide while we call someone for help?”

  “The basement in the garage,” Jeff whispered. “The light down there doesn’t work, but there’s tons of stuff to hide behind. Mom can never find me when I hide down there.”

  “Perfect,” Parker whispered. “Let’s go. And be quiet.”

  He shoved the phone in his pocket and followed the Powell siblings down the hall and out the door leading into the garage, locking the door behind him from the inside, hoping that might dissuade Tom from suspecting they were out there if he broke in.

  In the corner of the garage, they raised the rectangular door, which opened and closed via a fifty pound counter-weight attached to a pulley system on the wall, and slipped down the dark staircase. Jeff went down first, and quick. Parker went last pulling the door closed behind him, careful to keep it from slamming shut. Halfway down the narrow staircase, he bumped into Abby’s back, and she grabbed his arm to keep from falling when gravity forced her forward. Once she steadied, he grabbed her by the hand, and they proceeded to the foot of the stairs.

  “Jeff,” Abby whispered into the lightless void.

  “Over here.” His whisper came from behind them, somewhere under the staircase, seemingly somewhere far away. “There’s another hiding spot behind the boxes over there.”

  “Over where?” Abby whispered in frustration. “We can’t see shit, and I never come down here.”

  “Follow the wall, and you’ll feel them.”

  Parker eased in front of Abby and followed Jeff’s instructions, running his free hand along the wall until he came across a stack of cardboard boxes. He slithered around a few uneven stacks, shimmied behind them, and sat down with his back against the cool cement. Abby sat next to him and pulled her knees up to her chest. “You got the phone?” she whispered.

  Parker fished the cordless from his pocket. “I can’t see the buttons.”

  “Here.” Abby touched his arm and traced it to the phone. “I can do it. Should I call my mom or 9-1-1?”

  “9-1-1. They’ll get here quicker.”

  “Okay.”

  Parker listened as Abby fidgeted with the phone, punched rubber buttons, and then a loud dull beep echoed through the room. More button mashing, and the beep stopped. Abby repeated the motions with the same result. “I think we’re too far away from the receiver,” she whispered.

  She tried one more time to no avail, dropped the phone onto the cold cement floor with clatter, and pressed her forehead onto her knees.

  When Parker heard soft sobs, he put his arm over her shoulders but didn’t immediately speak. He breathed in the scent of moist cardboard for a moment, long enough to push back the fear creeping to the forefront of his own mind. Well aware he was the oldest hunter, the strongest, the biggest, and that the others often looked to him for leadership, he knew the words he needed to say, and that he needed to say them with confidence to assure Abby, to keep her calm. “It’s going to be all right. We’re safe down here. There’s no way he’ll find us.”

  Abby twisted sideways and rested her head on his shoulder, wrapped her arm around the front of his midsection. Stroking her hair, Parker angled his cricket ear toward the door and listened to the pressing silence. Seconds turned into minutes. Eventually, Jeff started whispering, most of the sentences a string of indecipherable hush, but Parker occasionally thought he heard the name Bart. In the darkness, usually unnoticed sounds suddenly became audible, tiny discomforts intense. Parker could hear a slight, annoying nose-whistle every time Abby exhaled, and the spine of the paperback in his back pocket seemed to be digging into his butt cheek harder and harder with each passing second. When Abby momentarily lifted her head off his shoulder to reposition herself, he tilted and pulled The Illustrated Man out of his back pocket to remedy the discomfort.

  “You know, after tonight we should have smooth sailing for a while.”

  “What?” Abby laid her head back on his shoulder.

  “My mom always says bad things always come in threes, and today has given us all three.” He counted on his fingers. “Dillo, Jose, and now your dad. So it can only get better from here, right?”

  Abby inhaled and exhaled, her whole body inflating and deflating. She looped her arm around Parker’s midsection again, tighter this time. “Do you think he’s gone?”

  Parker looked upward as if he could see through the darkness and the ceiling and know the truth. “Probably.” He started running his hand through her hair. “Do you remember much about him?”

  “Who?”

  “Your dad.”

  “Good or bad stuff?”

  “Either.”

  “I know my mom told everyone he was molesting me, and I don’t think she’d make something like that up, but I don’t remember any of it. I do remember watching him beat on my mom, though, and I remember not liking being alone with him, especially after he’d been smoking his pipe out back in the shed. But…” Abby shook her head without lifting it off of Parker’s shoulder. “I don’t know. I don’t like to think about that stuff.”

  “What about good stuff?”

  Parker felt a change in Abby’s face, a smile. “He liked to dance. Sometimes when he got out of the shower, he’d strut into the living room in his white underwear with his hair slicked back and pick me up and dance around the room. Mom hated how he’d turn the radio up real loud and toss me into the air, but I loved it. He smelled so good.”

  A gap of time passed with nothing but breathing sounds and Jeff’s faint whispers.

  When Abby adjusted her position again and moved her hand to Parker’s inner thigh, he placed his hand on her back. She started rubbing back and forth, inching toward his crotch, and he mimicked her, his hand sliding up her back beneath her shirt, into the waist of her shorts. She sat upright and kissed him, her warm tongue swirling rapidly inside his mouth. She threw her leg over his, straddling him, facing him. He ran his hand up her shirt, over her huge breasts. They moved and touched and kissed as Jeff whispered in the background. Parker lifted her shirt and put his mouth on her. When she moaned loud enough to quiet Jeff, he pulled away. She cupped her hands under his chin and kissed him hard.

  “What is Cel going to think about this?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Please. You know she has a major crush on you.” A beat. A change in tone. “Do you like her?”

  Unseen to Abby, Parker shook his head.

  “Do you?”

  “No,” Parker lied. He did like Cel, a lot. He found her attractive, mysterious, witty, and challenging, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t like Abby, too. Or a handful of other girls in Oak Mott. He was young, enjoyed having options, liked flirting in general, and it wasn’t as if he’d ever asked anyone to stay true to him. On his fifteenth birthday the previous year, his thrice divorced Uncle Marty, while sharing a secret beer with him in the backyard as his parents argued inside, had advised him to “take advantage of variety while he was still young and able,” “play the field before he got old and fat and bald and tied down.” Heeding that advice, Parker had made out with Somer Young at Huber Park a week earlier, and had been regularly talking on the phone deep into the night with Amy Lister—a sophomore lifeguard he’d met at the community pool in August. They had plans to go to the Buena Vista Drive-In sometime soon for a double matinee.

  “But I don’t think she needs to know about this,” Parker added. He swallowed down the salty taste of Abby’s saliva. “She might get pissed, and I sure as heck don’t want to get cursed or hexed or anything.” He poked her in t
he belly. “Do you?”

  When Abby chuckled, he did too, and she smashed her lips onto his.

  Chapter 21 - Yesenia

  Yesenia stood bedside and held her dead sister’s hand, waiting for Cel to return with the bag of supplies she’d stored in the back of her ‘82 Starlet. The IVs and tubes had been removed from Dolores’s body, a white sheet pulled up to her chin. Her salt and pepper hair splayed out on the sides of her head like open pigeon wings. The fluorescent lights stole what little color remained from her face. Yesenia alternated between whispering an awareness spell and calming spell. The awareness one to prepare Dolores’s spirit, the calming one for herself. Her chest and head ached, but she needed to stay vigilant, on point, and perform the death ceremony in a timely manner to ensure Dolores’s safe delivery into the afterlife. Her mom had schooled her and Dolores on the ceremony shortly before her own death many moons ago.

  When Cel returned, Yesenia instructed her to pay close attention, and then set the stage. She placed plumeria petals on the pillow around Dolores’s head, a yellow plate with dried mango slices and pan de leche on her belly, a cup of yerba buena in the center of the plate—Dolores’s favorites.

  On top of Dolores’s heart, she laid the doll their mom had made for Dolores when Dolores was a baby. Dolores had named the doll, made from used blankets and horse hair, Fatima. Yesenia had named hers Gabriela.

  After placing four white stones on the corners of the bed, Yesenia lit a white pillar candle and began swirling it in a circle over Dolores’s body. The doctor had granted her permission to perform any rites or rituals she wanted, so long as she didn’t damage the body or light any candles. Yesenia didn’t care what the white doctor had said. He didn’t understand. With Cel sitting in a chair behind her softly crying and sniffling, she whispered the death acceptance spell and the transition spell, each four times in Spanish, then she raised the candle up high and whispered a guidance request to Santa Muerte, La Huesuda, The Bony Lady, The Hand-Holder.