Cricket Hunters

by Jeremy Hepler

  “Right.” Abby agreed, giggling. “I never noticed them before we started hunting, but now that’s all I can hear when I’m trying to go to sleep at night.” She shot Cel a wry grin and flipped her off. “Thanks a lot.”

  Cel reciprocated the expression, rose, and gave a sarcastic curtsy. “My pleasure.”

  They were both chuckling when the sliding glass door opened and Natalie and Omar walked outside. “We’re here,” Natalie announced, a broad smile decorating her plump face. Abby and Cel had been helping her brainstorm new hair styles for school all week, spending hours in front of a mirror with roll-brushes and cans of hairspray, and although she’d already decided on a slightly parted, unkempt hair-do, she still wore her dad’s Astros cap every time she left the house.

  Parker nudged Omar’s arm. “What movie did you get? Nothing cheesy, I hope.”

  Omar held up a DVD and smiled as though he were holding up a well-deserved award. “Real Genius.”

  Parker took the DVD, read the blurbs, and examined Val Kilmer in his I Love Toxic Waste T-shirt on the cover. “Looks old.”

  “It’s hilarious,” Natalie said, snatching it out of his hand. “You’ll like it. Let’s go.”

  Cel led the way inside and saw Jeff’s head poking around the hallway corner. She waved, and when he immediately jerked his head back, she called out, “Hi, Jeff.”

  He poked his head back out, his dark eyes full of glee. “Hi.”

  Abby skirted Cel, marching at Jeff with one hand on her hip and her other arm pumping like a piston. He walked backwards, retreating into his room. “I thought I told you not to spy on us anymore!”

  “It’s my house, too,” Jeff yelled. “I can do whatever I want!” Then he slammed his bedroom door in her face.

  She pressed her hands against the door and kicked the bottom so hard the wood gave a little. “You better not come back out!”

  As she marched back toward the living room, the door creaked open, and she spun around. Jeff’s small hand poked out, his middle finger shot up, then the door slammed shut again.

  Abby plopped down in her usual spot on the end of the couch and crossed her arms over her chest. “I swear. He’s such a fucking pest.” She glanced at Cel who was sitting on the opposite end of the couch—her usual spot. “You’re so lucky to be an only child.”

  Cel ignored the remark, slipped off her chanclas, and pulled her legs up onto the couch into what her kindergarten teacher had called crisscross applesauce position. If engaged, Abby had the tendency to rail for hours about her brother.

  Parker put in the DVD, found the remote, and sat between Cel and Abby on the couch. Omar grabbed the two beanbags from the corner of the room and tossed one to Natalie. They sat on either side of the coffee table like always, beanbags snug against the couch armrests. Abby flicked off the lamp on the end table, and for the next hour and a half, sharing beer and popcorn and soda, they laughed and chatted and watched science geniuses exact comical revenge on a selfish professor.

  When the movie ended, Abby turned the lamp back on, and Natalie noted the time. It was almost ten o’clock. Her parents, Omar’s, and Parker’s, expected them home by ten-thirty on Saturdays. Cel’s abuela, the same. After helping Abby wash the dishes and hide the beer cans in the bottom of the kitchen trash, they all gathered on the driveway. A gentle breeze tickled the night air.

  Abby stood next to Parker while the others mounted their bikes. She glanced up at the diamond-studded sky and then at him. “So, we’ll meet tomorrow at Cel’s after dinner to hunt, right?”

  “Yep,” Parker confirmed. “The last hunt of summer.”

  Natalie moaned. “Don’t say that. I don’t want school to start.”

  “With a haircut like that, I wouldn’t either,” Omar said.

  Everyone but Natalie laughed. Her mouth fell open in a huge, I-can’t-believe-you-just-said-that smile, though. “You’re going to get it, little man.” She outweighed Omar, and every other hunter, by at least thirty pounds.

  Omar pedaled out of the driveway, the electric assist motor he’d attached to the pedals humming to life, and veered left. He was laughing so hard he nearly toppled over when he lost his balance at the end of the driveway. Natalie furiously pedaled after him, yelling for him to stop and take his punishment like a man. When they were about half a block away, Natalie yelled back over her shoulder, “See you guys tomorrow.”

  Cel hollered back, “Goodnight,” and turned to Parker. “You want a ride?”

  “Sure.”

  Jill, the younger of his two older sisters, had accidentally run over his bike and bent the frame in June. He’d been bumming rides with Cel ever since. Although her bike was the only one with wheel pegs, and they lived only one street apart, she liked to believe he rode with her because it gave him an excuse to be alone with her, to touch her. He hopped on her bike’s back wheel pegs and placed his hands on her shoulders. As she steered out of the driveway and onto Chaparral Street, Abby hollered, “Bye,” and they both waved back at her.

  Cel zigzagged through the Gateway neighborhood, coasting from street to street, cutting across vacant lots and weaving down dark alleys when needed, eliciting dog barks and triggering automatic security lights on houses. Parker kept a firm grip on her shoulders and leaned into her, keeping his head just to the right of hers. She could feel the warmth of his breath on her neck, the heat from his hands on her shoulders through her blue flannel and T-shirt.

  He whispered into her ear as they turned onto his street, “Let’s walk the rest of the way.” The words raised gooseflesh on her neck that quickly spread down her back and across her upper arms. He’d whispered stupid jokes and funny remarks into her ear countless times over the years with no such effect, but ever since their first kiss on Table Rock last May that had changed. Now, every time he whispered directly into her ear, her entire body responded with joy.

  Cel slowed to a stop, Parker jumped off, and she started walking her bike toward his house. She’d only taken two steps when he put his hands on top of hers and their eyes met. “Let me do it,” he said. “It’s the least I can do since you did all the work to get us here.”

  She held eye contact with him for a couple of steps before slowly sliding her hands out from under his. “What were you and Abby whispering about in the kitchen earlier?”

  “Oh yeah. That.” Parker shook his head. “You have to promise not to say anything. I swore to her I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

  “You know I won’t say anything.”

  “I know. It’s just one of those things you have to say.” He smiled at her. “She was telling about how her dad just got out of jail and has been calling and harassing her mom again.”

  Everyone in Oak Mott knew that Abby’s and Jeff’s dad, Tom Powell, had gone to jail for armed robbery a couple of years earlier. He and a buddy had held up a convenient store in Caprock, Texas, a small town about sixty miles northwest of Oak Mott, and were caught two blocks away with a measly seventy-six bucks between them. His mugshot was on the local news and in the Oak Mott Daily. He and Abby’s mom, Sheila, had been separated for years at the time, supposedly because he was an abusive crack addict who, according to the town rumor mill, had been caught “touching Abby in the bad way,” but they’d never legally divorced.

  “He keeps demanding to see Abby and Jeff.” Parker glanced at Cel. “Abby’s afraid he might show up and try to hurt her mom, or take her and Jeff or something. I don’t know. She said she’s been having nightmares about it and wanted to know if she could call me in the middle of the night if she got scared.”

  Cel fidgeted with her flannel shirt sleeves. Abby had never talked to any of them about her dad. The one time Omar had asked her about him right after the arrest, she started crying and said she didn’t want to talk about it and ran off. Since then, they only talked about him when she wasn’t around. “I wonder why she doesn’t want you to tell the rest of us about it.”

  Parker shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  They
passed the house next to Parker’s in silence, walked up his driveway, and stopped behind his dad’s truck. He leaned the bike against the tailgate and looked at Cel. “Based on what my parents say about her dad, he’ll probably be back in jail soon, so it won’t matter anyway. My dad says he’s been a no-good shithead who comes from a no-good family.”

  Cel nodded, but before she had the opportunity to respond, to ask Parker if he thought Abby could be lying, if Abby just wanted sympathy and attention, his sympathy and attention, he grabbed her hand, pulled her toward him, and kissed her. When he slipped his tongue in her mouth, she threw her arms around his neck, and pushed her chest and pelvis into him. He tasted of salt and sugar, popcorn, and beer. When he started sliding his hand toward her breast, she stopped him. “No.” Their faces were two inches apart, sharing air. “We can’t. Not tonight. Someone might see us out here.”

  “I’m sorry. I just can’t—” he broke off when the porch light popped on and the front door swung open.

  “Parker?” Lionel Lundy, Parker’s dad, a self-proclaimed plumber extraordinaire with a gut like a beach ball and long spindly chicken legs, stepped onto the porch. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing, Dad. Just talking to Cel. She gave me a lift home.”

  “Well, you need to come inside. And don’t lean that bike on my tailgate like that. It’ll scratch up the paint.”

  Parker looked at Cel, crossed his eyes, jiggled his head, and mockingly worked his mouth silently open and closed as his dad headed back inside. Fighting back laughter, she pulled her bike away from the truck and mounted it. “I better go.” As she turned and pedaled away, Parker ran up and smacked her butt, and she let out surprised squeal.

  “Bye, bye, little piggy,” he said, and broke into laughter.

  Smiling so true the joy reached her eyes, Cel looked back over her shoulder and flipped off Parker. “You’re the only pig around here.”

  He laughed again, shoved his hands in his pockets, and sauntered to the edge of the driveway as she sped down the center of the road, in and out of the glow of the streetlights, constantly glancing back at him.

  Cel felt as though she were ten feet off the ground, gliding on a cloud. What a night. What a summer. What a kiss. She sailed through the alley at the end of the road, but when she turned onto Cobalt Street and her house came into view, the cloud whisking her home suddenly vanished. Her grip on the handle bars tightened, and she found it almost impossible to pedal, to breathe, as though her round wheels had turned square, the air to thick sludge. An ambulance with its lights on was parked in front of her house, strobing red across her house. Two paramedics in blue uniforms were loading a gurney into the back. The person on the gurney was covered up to their chin with a white sheet.

  Cel recited a calming spell, the same spell her abuela had whispered over when she was scared or angry or panicked for as long as she could remember, as she jumped the curb into her front yard. She hopped off her bike and dropped it on the ground. The back wheel was still spinning as she sprinted inside.

  “Buela?”

  “Buela?”

  When Yesenia emerged from the kitchen and walked into the living room, Cel ran over to her and hugged her. “What’s going on? Is it Tia Dillo?”

  Yesenia nodded. She had tears in her eyes, which caused Cel’s eyes to well up. Cel had never seen her abuela cry. “Is she going to be all right?”

  “No se,” Yesenia said. “I came back from the store and found her lying on the bathroom floor and her head was bleeding and I couldn’t wake her up and the spells wouldn’t work and I didn’t think she was breathing, so I called 911. I know she didn’t want to go to a doctor and I don’t like them much either but…”

  Yesenia spoke so fast and with such a thick Spanish accent that her words ran together into one long continuous ebb and flow of sound. Cel didn’t understand everything she said, but she understood enough. She hugged Yesenia again, longer and harder this time.

  Chapter 10 - Cel

  Three days after Dolores was admitted to Oak Mott Memorial Hospital, Cel decided to take action. She’d spent all day Sunday at the hospital with Yesenia, helping perform healing rituals over Dolores, and had ridden her bike to the hospital after school on Monday and Tuesday and sat with Yesenia for an hour or so before heading home to eat and cricket hunt with the others. Dolores was unconscious but stable, weak but alive. An MRI had found a golf ball-sized tumor in her frontal lobe. More tests were scheduled for later in the week.

  Cel hated seeing Tia Dillo, a woman whose signature color palate knew no bounds, lying like a corpse in a white gown, under a white blanket, on a white bed, surrounded by white machines, in a white room. She hated the beeps from the machines and the invasive antiseptic smell. She hated how hollow and pale Dolores looked. How frail. How dead. She also hated seeing the desperate, lost look in her abuela’s eyes as she sat guard over her sister. The look assured Cel that if Dolores died, a part of Yesenia would die, too.

  Cel didn’t doubt the doctors about the tumor, she doubted the cause. Like her abuela, she didn’t blame chance or genetics, she blamed Maria Lopez. Maria had cursed Dolores, plain and simple. She had planted an evil energy, a devouring growth fueled by cursed crickets, inside of Dolores’s head for revenge, for retribution, and despite her abuela’s refusal to discuss the subject, Cel firmly believed that if she weakened Maria, the evil would lose its hold over Dolores. She also knew that if Dolores’s and Yesenia’s magic hadn’t been able to remove the curse, hers alone stood no chance. She had to try something different. Something other than magic. She needed to cut off Maria’s strongest power source.

  Yesenia had asked them to please continue hunting even though Dolores was in the hospital, so after leaving the hospital Tuesday night, Cel, Parker, and Abby cleared the crickets from around the house and the edge of Hunter’s Haven. They returned to Cel’s back porch around nine, propped their sticks against the railing, and sat on the steps. Omar and Natalie had hunted with them the two previous nights but were absent because they had to attend a band fundraiser at school.

  The three sat in silence for a while before Parker said, “Not too many out tonight.”

  “Nope,” Abby agreed.

  Cel didn’t chime in. She was leaning forward with her elbows on her thighs, chin propped on her fists. Her eyes were aimed at the ground, lips pinched. Parker touched her arm. “You okay?”

  Cel looked his direction and slowly nodded. When he looked as though he were about to say something else, she blurted out, “I need your help tonight.” She would’ve preferred to wait until she and Parker were alone to tell him her plan, to only work with him, that’s how she’d envisioned it, anyway, but she hadn’t had any alone time with him in the past few days, and she knew Abby wouldn’t head home without his escort.

  “Sure,” he said. “With what?”

  Cel sat up straight. “I think I know how to help Tia Dillo.”

  “How?” Parker’s tone conveyed his confusion.

  Cel’s eyes slid back and forth from Parker to Abby. “I have to take Maria’s familiar away from her.”

  “Her what?” Abby asked, befuddled.

  “Familiar,” Parker answered. “It’s a magical pet, right?”

  Cel simpered and nodded. He remembered. Years back, Cel couldn’t remember exactly when, Yesenia had told him and the others about familiars while they nibbled on fresh tortillas during one of her magical back porch story sessions. “Hers is a cat named Frito.”

  “Seriously?” Abby shook her head. “You really think stealing a stupid cat will help your aunt’s brain tumor?”

  “Frito works hand-in-hand with Maria,” Cel snapped back. “Their bond is so strong, she says he doubles the power of her spells. If she doesn’t have him, her pull on Tia Dillo won’t be as strong, and then my abuela’s healing spells might work better.”

  Abby sighed and addressed Cel as if she were five years old. “Listen, I feel horrible about your aunt, I do, and I know you might
believe that taking that cat will help, but—”

  “It will.” Cel cut in. “And I’m doing it.” She looked to Parker, hoping her determination was evident in her eyes. “I have to. It’s the only chance she’s got.”

  Parker searched her face. “Where does Maria live?”

  Cel smiled. She knew she could count on Parker. He got her. “On Clover Lane. I’ve gone over there with my abuela and Tia Dillo a bunch of times. We can get there in about ten minutes.”

  Abby shot Parker a look of disbelief. “Are you really going to do this? If you get caught, you could get arrested.” She stood up, cocked her hip to the right, crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m not going to break into anybody’s house.”

  “You don’t have to,” Cel said, keeping her eyes on Parker. “No one should be there. All I need is someone to be lookout.”

  “How do you know no one will be there?” Parker asked.

  Cel glanced down at her feet and bit her lip, treading the fine line between nervousness and shame. “I’ve been spying on the house the past few nights, riding over there after you guys leave.” She met eyes with Parker, and he smiled as though pleasantly surprised by her antics, which made her smile, too. “She kicked her husband out after she caught him cheating with Dolores, and she works until ten every weeknight at M and R Liquor.”

  “What about Jose? Doesn’t he still live at home?” Abby asked. Maria’s only child, her nineteen-year-old son Jose, was short and stocky and had a penchant for gaudy jewelry like his mom. Cel couldn’t stand him. He constantly stroked his lucky stache and seemed to not own a single shirt. Every time she’d been at the Lopez house when he was home, he’d teased her about her flat chest and boy clothes, about how he knew she was a dyke, but he could change that if she’d let him.