The Princess of Las Pulgas (7 page)

I dig my fingernails into
my palms and keep my eyes straight ahead.

Mom drives with both hands
clutching the wheel, her knuckles white. The one sound in the car
besides the motor is Quicken. She’s howling for all of
us.

It’s only a twenty-minute
drive, but while the time is nothing, the difference it makes in my
life is huge. Mom turns into the narrow driveway and winds through
the backside of the complex where dumpsters line up against a chain
link fence, cardboard boxes and black plastic garbage bags poke
from under the heavy lids. On the opposite side is a flat-roofed
carport. Some of the bunker-like spaces shelter trucks or cars that
no longer need to be smog-checked they’re so old. Moving boxes,
broken furniture, and freezer chests are the most common items
stacked along the walls.

When we come to space 148
Mom parks. Even Quicken stops making noises and we sit inside the
Tercel in silence.

My cell chimes and breaks
the spell. As Mom and Keith get out, I flick open my phone and a
number I don’t recognize pops up on the screen.

“Moving day, right? Aunt
Corky knows all.” Sean’s voice sends shock waves through my
chest.

“Right.” I climb out of the
car.

“What’s your new
address?”

I’m in the bowels of Las Pulgas, and Sean
Wright wants to know where I live? Is there no justice in this
world?

“Um, I don’t know the
address yet. Can you call me later? I’ll give it to you.” Then I
remember I’ll only have my cell phone one more week. I glare at
Mom’s retreating back. She’s taking everything away. Without
explaining that all I’ll have is a home phone, I give Sean our new
number and my email.

As I snap my phone closed,
my thoughts churn.
How am I going to keep
my friends at Channing from seeing where I live? And what about
Lena?
I’ve deliberately missed three calls
from my best friend already and she emailed about coming over to
see my new “house.” I can’t tell her I’ll be living in a Las Pulgas
apartment, and I have no intention of ever letting Lena see this
dumpy place with the dented refrigerator and a stove Mom calls
vintage Ark. I’m wearing out the chain on my Sweet Sixteen bracelet
by twisting it almost all the time now, counting the links—where
they begin, where they end—and pushing away the reason that makes
me ache inside.

I follow Mom and Keith who
pick their way toward the gate that separates the carport from a
kidney-shaped pool. Quicken is curled into a silent fetal ball
inside the cage that Keith holds close to his chest. They push open
the gate and walk across the pool area where tables are littered
with overflowing ashtrays. Keith kicks aside a dented beer can and,
following Mom, climbs the steps. With one hand I grasp the iron
railing. It wobbles.
A lot of good this
thing is going to do to keep anyone from falling.
I make my way across the creaky balcony to the
apartment.

Night brings a whole
different character to our palace. What starts as a hide and seek
game with kids by the pool about three, turns into a weekend keg
party with booming music by eleven. The windows pulse to the beat
so hard that I'm sure they're going to pop out of their aluminum
frames.

When Mom yanks the front
window curtain closed it falls onto her head. She hurls the curtain
and years of dust explode around us.

Keith disappears down the
hall, leaving Mom and me about ten paces apart, dueling
range.

“Don't say a word, young
lady. Do you hear me?” She snatches the phone from her purse, flips
it open and stabs her finger on her keypad.

“This is Mrs. Edmund. 148.
Can’t you put a stop to that loud party?”

While she's talking I coax
Quicken out of her carrier and slip away to my bedroom, shutting
the door without turning on the lights. It's better not to show
that world outside where I'm hiding. Tomorrow I’ll borrow one of
Keith’s black sheets to hang at my window.

Later, the police arrive
and for a while red swirling lights chase each other around the
walls of my room. Bull horns shout to clear the pool area. One more
shattered glass bottle hits the sidewalk; then slowly the sound and
light show grinds down, leaving only the hum of the pool pump and
the yellow glow of bug lights at the side of each apartment
door.

The quiet doesn't last
long. Something crashes against my wall and a woman's angry voice
shouts words that would make the FCC duct tape her mouth. A man's
voice mumbles something I can't make out; then a door slams and the
pool pump is the only noise again. Like I used to when I was
little, I crack open my door to the hall. Somehow that makes my
room less scary and it reduces the faint smell of cigarette smoke
that’s seeping through my wall from next door.

I don't hear Quicken, but I
know she's at the back of my closet, crouched and staring. Getting
on my hands and knees I look inside. “Quicken, come here, fur
person.”

She hisses. When I reach
for her she slinks along the wall and disappears into a dark space
behind my desk.

I roll inside my comforter,
not bothering to make my bed. I want to vanish and not just for
tonight, forever.

Another sound begins. It's
one that's become a familiar part of the night. Mom tries to muffle
her crying as she passes my door, but she can't muffle the pain of
it. Tonight it hurts me to hear her more than it ever did in
Channing.

Chapter 15

“Quicken. Here kitty-
kitty-kitty.” Mom’s voice startles me from a dream that has left a
sour lemon taste in my mouth. I jump from bed, letting the
comforter fall to the floor, looking around the box cluttered room.
I’ve come from a dream into a nightmare. Surely I’ll wake up and
hear the ocean. Surly the traffic noises will fade once I get my
bearings.

My door is slightly ajar
and Mom sticks her head inside. “Honey, is Quicken in
here?”

I shake my head; my mouth
won’t open. My eyes are slits. If I look in the mirror I know I’ll
be facing Carlie Edmund, puffy-eyed Las Pulgas dweller. “Get
dressed. We’ll have to search for her. She must have run outside
when I went to the store this morning.” Mom closes my door,
calling, “Quicken. Here kitty-kitty- kitty.” After we search all
the crevices in the apartment and still can’t find Quicken, I set
out to scout the area. When I knock on the door to Apartment 147
the door pops open the width of a security-chained crack. A woman
squints at me through the slot.

“What?” I recognize the
voice, but she doesn’t scream at me like she does the person she
lives with.

“We’ve lost a Siamese cat.”
The woman slips the chain free and opens the door. “What, is it,
like, joined at the hip or someplace?”

At first I don’t get it,
then when I do I don’t like the joke. “Her name’s Quicken and she's
silver with a black face.”

The woman steps outside.
“Sounds interesting, but it’s not here.” She eyes me and lights a
cigarette. “You the new neighbor next door?”

I nod.

The woman flicks her ashes
over the balcony.

“Who is it?” A gravelly
voice comes from inside, then a man pokes his head out and fixes me
with heavy-lidded eyes. “Whaddya want?” His jowls jiggle when he
talks.

“Butt out, Gerald.” She
sounds as if she’s giving commands to a particularly stupid dog.
She flicks ashes at his feet and he ducks inside, leaving the door
open. The woman follows after him, but before closing the door she
says, “Cats come home when they get hungry.”

I try a couple more doors,
but nobody answers. At Apartment 152 the door jerks open and a man
in an orange prisoner-style jumpsuit stands staring at me. Looking
over the man’s shoulder is a lanky boy with short dark hair and
intense eyes that travel from my chest to my hips and back, making
me feel like I forgot to put clothes on.

“Whatta ya sellin’?” the
man asks.”Whatever it is we don’t need it.”

The boy’s eyes make another
sweep over me.

“I’m look for a Siamese
cat? Have you seen her? She’s wearing a —”

“I ain’t seen no cat.” The
man shuts the door so fast I still have my mouth open.

That’s enough of meeting
the neighbors.
“Jerk.” I go to the pool
area to check behind the barbeque pit and under plastic lounge
chairs, but there’s no sign of Quicken.

Keith walks down the short
path from the carport and lets himself through the gate. He kneels
at the edge of the pool and tests the water with his hand. “I
wonder what the percentage of pee is.”

“That’s gross.”

“Any luck?” He flicks the
water from his hand.

“Quicken’s the only sane
one in this family. She's escaped.” I test one of the plastic
chaise lounges to see if it collapses. When it doesn’t, I sit with
my legs stretched out.

Keith joins me, his arms on
his knees, staring at his feet. “This place totally sucks.” The
silence hangs between us until he says, “I’m dropping
track.”

“Track is all you ever
wanted to do.”

“Not at Las
Pulgas.”

I know why. He doesn’t want
to compete against his old teammates. He knows Las Pulgas will lose
because Channing has topnotch runners.

This is the first time in a
while we’ve been alone and talked, instead of sniping at each
other. He hasn’t gotten a haircut in two months, so the way his
sandy hair falls across his forehead reminds me of Dad. Now I can
work on that promise. Today I’ll talk to my brother like he’s
human.

Keith plucks at his
Channing Track shirt as if he wants to rip it to pieces.

I get that, too. He’s as
ashamed of where we’ve landed as I am. “Come on. Let’s blow this
dump and see if we can follow Quicken’s escape route.”

We walk the perimeter of
the complex, calling to Quicken. When we come to the street we turn
toward the center of town. Bits of black plastic flutter tangled in
spiky weeds along the sidewalk and the curb is littered with used
paper cups, candy wrappers and other trash I don’t want to
identify, litter the curbside. At the stoplight, we start back,
discouraged. If Quicken crossed into town, we’ll never find
her.

When we reach the driveway
leading into the complex, I stop to look more closely under the
bushes. I now notice that the sidewalk on the left side of the
driveway becomes a dirt road. It’s like whoever paved around the
apartments ran out of concrete.

“Let’s look down there,” I
say to my brother, pointing.

Keith starts in that
direction, saying, “Quicken might have gone exploring.”

“Wait.” I point at a sign
partly covered by a low-hanging limb. “That says ‘No
Trespassing.’”

“We’re not trespassing.
We’re looking for a lost cat. Come on.”

The road slopes away and
becomes overgrown. The traffic sounds from Las Pulgas blend into a
distant hum. Birds flush from the undergrowth and small brown
critters with tails scurry behind rocks as we approach. With each
step I have the feeling we are walking back into another time, a
time before open space disappeared under asphalt and apartment
houses.

We continue around a
sweeping turn and come to a gate with a rope looped around a post.
Keith ignores the second “No Trespassing” sign and slips the rope
free. We enter a silent grove of trees, their gnarled trunks lined
up on either side of us. Somewhere behind all these leaves is the
Las Pulgas of today, but it looks like the developers forgot this
place was here. At the end of the road is a two-storied house with
a wide front porch. The curtains are drawn, but someone lives here.
Plants in hanging baskets are sprouting their first green leaves,
getting ready for spring, and wooden rockers sit empty, waiting for
the warm weather.

“What are these?” Keith
asks, touching the bark of a tree.

I shrug.
“Trees?”

“Very funny. What
kind?”

“They’re apple trees.” The
voice comes from behind us. I spin around, face to face with a man,
a long-barreled gun lying across his forearms. “Seems you don’t
know your trees anymore than you know how to read.”

“We—” I choke. “We lost our
cat. We wanted to see if she might have come this direction.” I
grab Keith’s hand like I used to when he was four and I was six.
Dad always said I was the big sister. I had to keep Keith safe when
we crossed the street. He’d never said what to do when a man faced
us with a big gun.

His wide-brimmed cowboy hat
sits squarely on his head casting a dark ring around his broad
shoulders. He cradles the gun as if it's a part of him and while I
can't see his eyes for the shadow from his hat brim I'm sure
they're trained on us—steady, unblinking. His skin is tight across
his cheekbones, bronzed and shiny, and his features are sharp like
a hawk. He's used to working with his hands, but in spite of the
scars and leathery skin his nails are trimmed and clean. He stands
easy and balanced on both feet, silently watching us.

“Her name is Quicken.” My
mouth develops a sudden case of drought, leaving my tongue filmed
with dust. “Our cat.” I squeeze Keith’s hand to say let’s get out
of here, and he returns the pressure.