She looks the world in the eye and spits into the winds of caprice. : Return of the Queen

The Queen is back on the streets.

I found her in Canoga Park standing aside her beat-up old ’67 Pontiac Bonneville, bundled against the early morning chill with a woolen cap, five sweaters and a faded blue corduroy coat.

Nothing has changed.

She’s still just a half step ahead of cops, thugs and people who don’t want her around. She’s still trying to figure out how to get her dog back and make everything work.

Moments before I came along, a uniformed patrolman had ordered her to move on because someone from a Catholic school across the street resented her presence.

It’s that way for her all the time.

“That’s OK,” she told the cops, “I don’t want no trouble.”

She had half the belongings of her life piled on the hood, the top and the trunk of the battered tan Bonneville, and she was sticking them back in the car when I found her.

Sticking them back in, by the way, was no problem because someone had smashed the window on the driver’s side while stealing her purse, which contained almost nothing, and it left her with easy entry and ventilation in the heap she calls home.

You remember the Queen.

She says her real name is Princess Red Fawn and she’s 83 years old, although sometimes she guesses at 84. The small print in her life isn’t all that clear. People who have seen her around the Valley call her Queen of the Streets.

She’s been living in the Pontiac for about the past three years for reasons she can’t fully recall. She had a home once and a son and $20,000, but they’re gone now, all of them.

So’s the dog.

The mutt’s name is Tweetie, and it was taken from the Queen’s car sometime last September by a woman with more compassion for animals than humans who decided Tweetie wasn’t getting proper care.

Forget that Animal Control says he was getting proper care and forget that the Queen loves and misses him dearly. The woman who has the dog won’t give him back until the old lady has a place to live and a yard for the mutt to romp about in.

The Queen says the cops tell her that they’ve seen Tweetie and he’s fine, which is strange because the dog was stolen from her car, and if they know where her stolen property is, why the hell don’t they get it back?

Not long after the dog was taken, a hit-run driver smashed into the Queen’s car when she wasn’t around, so that the Pontiac, never sleek, now looks like something that ought to be compressed and melted down, but it runs, and the Queen loves that, too.

I wrote about the old lady and her dog last August, and for a while she had all kinds of attention. People stopped by and gave her money and treated her various health problems and looked for her dog and even tried to get her a place to live.

But the Queen says they lost interest somewhere along the way, and they haven’t come back. She says it calmly and without rancor, because when you’re old and poor and maybe not too clear about things, you’re easy to forget after a while.

The milk of human kindness wasn’t intended to flow forever.

I even find myself getting annoyed at her because she gets $630 a month from Social Security and spends most of it storing used clothing and jewelry from a second-hand store she apparently owned once.

I asked her why she didn’t just sell the stuff in storage and get a place to live.

“Because,” she said, with a kind of old lady’s ferocity, “I’m going to start another store someday, and I’m gonna need everything I’ve got! You watch!”

I like the Queen.

I like the way she looks the world in the eye and spits into the winds of caprice. I mean, hell, she’s barely 5 feet tall and probably weighs less than 100 pounds, but she’s still as independent as rain and as tough as the old pepper trees that spread over her Bonneville.

“How do you sleep in there?” I asked.

The car is more jammed with stuff than it was six months ago when I first found her.

“Sitting up,” she replied. “I pile old coats over me and blankets around my feet, and I keep warm all right.”

“What about the broken window?”

“Cardboard.”

She had a cold for a while and kept a bottle of cough medicine nearby, and some deep-heating lotion too, because her legs sometimes ache.

“What you need,” I said, “is for someone to store your stuff for nothing, so you can get a place to live.”

“If they kept it for nothing,” she said, “I’d have money to get another store.”

“Instead of a place to live?”

She shrugged and didn’t answer, but I suspect that for all her misfortune--the missing dog and the battered car and the stolen purse and the broken window--the Queen doesn’t mind the streets.

Maybe she knows something we don’t know from messages carried on the winds that whisper around the cardboard in her car window, words understood only by tough old ladies who rule the streets.

“I’ll get by,” she says.

I believe that.