The Higher Power of Lucky Read online

  Lucky hoisted her backpack off the floor and plopped it beside her on the banquette. “Do we have those olives I like?” she asked. She hated the strong salty wrinkled black ones.

  Brigitte surveyed the many glass jars in the door of the fridge. “Non,” she said. “And it is too bad, because the little olives from Nice would be better, you are right. Sometimes we just have to make it do.”

  “Make do,” Lucky corrected.

  Brigitte sighed and nodded. “Make do,” she agreed.

  3. Good and Bad

  Out of the millions of people in America who might become Lucky’s mother if Brigitte went home to France, Lucky wondered about some way to trap and catch the exact right one. She was pretty sure she’d be able to, if only she had a Higher Power.

  But when she envisioned her perfect mother, she kept thinking of traits and habits like Brigitte’s. That always made her think somehow not of the perfect mother but of the perfect child, which in most ways Lucky already was, but not in every way. Brigitte did not fully realize the ways Lucky was almost perfect, but she did notice thoroughly the ways Lucky was not.

  Lucky did not want to speak French, for instance, which is a jumpy language full of sounds that you have to gargle in the back of your throat. The back of Lucky’s throat could not learn to make these sounds, no matter how hard it tried. Of course, she had learned to say Brigitte’s name the French way—Bree-JEET—instead of the American way, BRIDGE-it.

  Lucky got Brigitte as her Guardian when she was eight years old. The reason was that Lucille, Lucky’s mother, went outside one morning after a big rainstorm, and she touched some power lines that had blown down in the storm. She touched them with her foot.

  In her mind, Lucky worked on a list of good traits and bad traits in mothers.

  Some aspects of life are strange or even terrible, but later something okay or even good happens that would never have happened without the bad/strange thing. An example was how long, long ago, a man who later became Lucky’s father went to France and got married to a French woman. Then they got divorced because he did not want to have children. Later, that same man came back to America (he was still not Lucky’s father yet) and met an artist named Lucille, who had silky-feeling shoulders. This was a thing he probably liked a lot—where you could put your cheek against the top of her arm and your cheek loved that comfortable feeling. Her fingers smelled like paint thinner, a very good smell and Lucky’s favorite smell, along with air-conditioned air. Lucille used to hum little tunes for different situations that made you think of certain ads on TV and laugh. So they fell in love and got married.

  But he still didn’t want children, and Lucille divorced him too. It was too late, though. Ha-ha! Lucky was already born.

  So when Lucky needed a Guardian to guard her during the time after the storm, Lucky’s father called up that first wife, the French one. She was still in France, but she said she would come to California. She came the next day. She turned out to be Brigitte.

  Only a very big and terrible thing could make her jump on a plane and fly thousands and thousands of miles—because Brigitte did not love Lucky’s father any longer, and she didn’t even know Lucille, and she’d never even heard of Lucky before. Plus she had her own French life going along, full of plans, and her old French mother. That terrible thing was the thing that happened to Lucille when Lucky was eight, the morning after the storm in the desert.

  Lucky loved rainstorms because of how wild and scary they are, when you are safe inside your trailer with the wind whooshing and blowing like crazy and rain pouring down so hard it turns the dry streambed into a river. Her favorite part was afterward, when it smells like the first day of the history of the world, like creosote and wild sage. The sun comes out and you look around at all the changes the storm has caused: the outside chairs blown away, the Joshua trees plumped up with water, the ground still a little wet.

  That is what Lucky imagined her mother was doing—sniffing up the morning and feeling the cool ground with her toes—when she stepped on a downed power line, was electrocuted, and died.

  And this is how Lucky became a ward, which is the person a Guardian guards. A ward must stay alert, carry a well-equipped survival kit at all times, and watch out for danger signs—because of the strange and terrible and good and bad things that happen when you least expect them to.

  4. Graffiti

  Even though it was only Friday afternoon, and her report on the life cycle of the ant wasn’t due until Monday, Lucky got out her notebook, thinking she could finish by dinner. Then Lincoln phoned.

  “Hi, Lucky,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  Silence. Lucky knew Lincoln had a hard time talking on the phone because he needed both hands for tying knots on a string or a cord. When he was about seven, Lincoln’s brain had begun squeezing out a powerful knot-tying secretion that went through his capillaries and made his hands want to tie knots. He’d learned how to tie about a million different ones, plus bends and hitches.

  She heard a crash when he dropped the phone and then a jostling while he got it cradled between his ear and his shoulder. This was the usual thing that happened when they called each other.

  “Listen,” he said. “Do you have any of those thick permanent-marker pens? A black one?”

  “I think so. What for?”

  “It’s that sign Miles asked about, the one he noticed on the way back from school today.”

  “‘Pop. 43’?”

  “No, after that. Right when the school bus pulls into Hard Pan.”

  “Yeah,” Lucky said. It was a diamond-shaped orangy-yellow traffic sign. Miles was in kindergarten and was learning to read, which made him interested in finding out what every sign said. Lucky was glad that there were only a few signs on the long highway to and from school in Sierra City. “What about it?”

  “I’ll explain later. Bring the marker and meet me there in a few minutes.”

  “This doesn’t have anything to do with Knot News, does it?” Lincoln got a newsletter every month from the International Guild of Knot Tyers, which he was one of the youngest members of. It was a fairly boring newsletter to Lucky, but Lincoln read every page minutely, like he was memorizing it, and then he told Lucky all about things like what makes a good fid (which is some kind of knotting tool). Lucky knew that the latest Knot News had arrived recently.

  “Nope,” Lincoln said. “It’s about the sign. Just meet me there. You’ll see.”

  HMS Beagle was already standing at the screen door, looking out. A lot of times she knew what was going to happen even before Lucky did. “Okay,” Lucky said, thinking she could also capture a few ants and glue them to her report for extra credit.

  She hung up and went to look at herself in the little mirror on the door of the cabinet by her bed. The trouble about Lucky, and this was a big problem she couldn’t solve, had to do with being all one color.

  Her eyes, skin, and hair, including her wispy straight eyebrows, were all the same color, a color Lucky thought of as sort of sandy or mushroomy. The story she told herself to explain it was that on the day before her birth, the color enzymes were sorting themselves in big vats. Unfortunately, Lucky decided to be born a little ahead of schedule, and the enzymes weren’t quite finished sorting—there was only one color-vat ready and the color in that vat was sandy-mushroom. So Lucky got dipped in it, head to toe, there being no time for nice finishing touches like green eyes or black hair, and then, wham, she was born and it was too late except for a few freckles.

  Before hoisting on her survival kit backpack, Lucky rummaged in it for a small plastic bottle of mineral oil. A remedy she’d thought of to the all-one-color situation, since Brigitte wouldn’t let her use actual makeup, was to dab a tiny bit of oil on her eyebrows, which made them glisten so you could at least see them.

  One side of Lucky’s mind wondered if Lincoln noticed her hair-eyes-skin-all-one-sandy/mushroomy-color aspect, but the other side doubted it because he was always absorbed in his
knots or in Knot News.

  Lucky found the marker and her floppy hat, and she and HMS Beagle went outside. Brigitte was watering her big tubs with herbs growing in them.

  “This parsley is going already to seed,” Brigitte told Lucky. “The seed packet says in hot weather parsley may bolt early. This word makes the parsley sound like a horse running away.” She looked at Lucky’s hat. “And you are bolting too, right before dinner?”

  “I’m meeting Lincoln—he needs to borrow the marker.”

  “Please come back before the sun goes down, ma puce.” Brigitte pinched tiny white flowers off of a bushy plant, and Lucky smelled the herb Brigitte put into spaghetti sauce. She said, “I would like to catch that rabbit who eats my basil.”

  Lucky did not tell Brigitte that it would have been easy to trap the cottontail. She knew Brigitte would skin it and cook it, and Lucky did not want Peter Rabbit for dinner.

  She and HMS Beagle set out for the town’s main road—five minutes if you took the shortcut behind the old abandoned saloon.

  When they got to the sign, Lincoln hadn’t arrived yet, so Lucky shrugged out of her backpack and dug around in it for a Ziploc bag. The old rutted blacktop road was too hot to be near—it was much hotter than the sandy ground—so Lucky and HMS Beagle went off to the side by some bushes to look for ants. Pretty soon the Beag found a little lace of shade under a creosote to lie down in, and Lucky found some ants.

  As she watched them traveling along in a couple of lanes to and from a quarter-size hole, Lucky had a sudden large revealing thought about ants. At first she felt sorry for them because they were so tiny and could be killed so easily. She could kill ten or twenty at one time, probably. But then she realized that, with ants, it wasn’t so much the one individual ant that counted. They all stayed seriously on their jobs and none of them went off on tangents the way people do. For instance, you didn’t have one ant deciding to meet a friend and another ant knocking off work early and another ant lying around staring at the clouds.

  No, the ants acted like one single machine, instead of zillions of separate tiny minds and bodies. They had good teamwork. If some died, the others didn’t stand around worrying about it. For ants, there was definitely no “I” in “team.”

  So as Lucky was realizing that, to an ant, its Higher Power might be the whole colony itself, Lincoln sauntered up. HMS Beagle whapped her tail in the sand, not getting up from her shady spot.

  “I was thinking,” Lucky said, “about the lives of ants—which is different from the life cycle of ants. I mean, think about if some of them die. The others just go on like they didn’t even notice. You can’t even make an impression on them.”

  “Hmmm,” Lincoln said. He held a loop of string between two fingers and threaded one end through it and then back under. Lincoln could be hard to keep a conversation going with. He listened, but he didn’t necessarily contribute.

  “If you were an ant,” Lucky went on, “what would your Higher Power be?”

  Lincoln scrunched his eyes at her. “No idea,” he said, and went to pat HMS Beagle, who stretched out on her back and waved her paws in the air to show him she wanted her chest rubbed. He said to Lucky, “How come your eyebrows are kind of wet?”

  Lucky smoothed the mineral oil on her eyebrows with her fingers. “It’s a new beauty product,” she explained. “For glistening.”

  HMS Beagle’s ribcage looked much more huge when she was lying on her back than when she was standing. Lincoln scratched it. “Your eyebrows really go…with the rest of you,” he said without looking up.

  Lucky didn’t have the slightest clue what to say to that. She was pretty sure—but not positive—that it was a compliment. She scooped five or six ants and some sand into the little bag and carefully zipped it closed. “Well,” she finally said, “what’s the deal with the sign?”

  “Did you read it?”

  Lucky skirted around to the front of the sign, which was bolted to a metal post, and studied the words in large black capital letters against the orangy-yellow background:

  SLOW

  CHILDREN

  AT

  PLAY

  Lucky frowned. “So?” she asked.

  “That sign is about us,” Lincoln said. “Where’s the pen?”

  “Lincoln, what are you going to do? It’s illegal to draw on a traffic sign. It’s probably illegal even to touch it.” Lucky worried about Lincoln getting in trouble. His mother, who worked part-time as a librarian in Sierra City, wanted him to grow up to be the President of the United States. Lucky knew that if he ran for President, during his campaign his opponent would uncover every single bad thing he’d ever done in his life. Someone would find out that when he was ten years old he graffitied SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY and Lincoln could lose the election.

  Lincoln’s father was an Older Dad with a pension—he was twenty-three years older than Lincoln’s mom—and looked more like a grandfather than a father. He drove around the desert in his homemade dune buggy searching for historic pieces of barbed wire, and then he sold them on eBay. Lincoln’s dad said he shouldn’t worry about becoming the President of the United States until he was in college. Lincoln’s mom said he should worry about it every day, starting now. But the only thing Lincoln actually worried about, he had told Lucky, was how to get enough money to go to the annual convention of the International Guild of Knot Tyers in England, and then how to make his parents agree to let him go.

  “Lucky,” Lincoln explained, “people see that sign and they think, ‘Huh. Slow children. Kids around here aren’t too smart.’ Or else they think, ‘Gosh, these Hard Pan kids don’t move too fast. Must be ’cause of the heat.’”

  Lucky had never thought of these interpretations. She figured everyone read the sign and thought, Okay, time to slow down because there are children playing. “And?” she asked.

  “Just give me the marker.”

  Lucky looked around to see if anyone was paying attention. Down at the side of the dirt road that went off the main paved one, a couple of pairs of boots were sticking out from under someone’s old VW van. The wearers of the boots were pounding on the van’s stomach. She heard the soft hooting calls of an owl who’d woken up early. The little glass observation tower at the Captain’s house, where he liked to sit and watch what was going on around town, looked empty—and anyway she knew the heat in it would be too much to bear right now. There were, as usual, no cars on the road. She handed over the marker.

  Lincoln put his string in his pocket and rubbed away the dust beside the word SLOW with the hem of his T-shirt. Lucky was afraid he was going to try to fit DOWN next to it, but she knew he couldn’t, and it would look bad. The sharp upside-down V of the top of the diamond came too close to SLOW.

  But instead Lincoln did something brilliant. Next to SLOW, he drew two neat perfect-size dots, one like a period and the other a little above it. Lucky knew it was a colon and it made the sign mean, “You must drive slow: There are children at play.”

  “Wow,” she said. “That is…presidential.”

  Lincoln rolled his eyes and blushed and handed her the pen. His dark hair flopped over on his forehead in a springy, independent way. It was hair that would do whatever it wanted to, no matter how he combed it. Lucky liked that kind of hair quite a lot.

  In one of her brain crevices where she stashed things she wanted to be sure to remember when she grew up, Lucky put the SLOW: CHILDREN AT PLAY episode. If Lincoln did decide to run for President of the United States, Lucky would go on TV and tell everything in exact detail: the misleadingness of the sign, the cleverness of Lincoln, the neatness of his two dots, the happy-endingness of the story. Except she would never tell the very private and lovely part about her glistening eyebrows.

  5. Miles

  A good way to kill a bug that you need as a specimen, without smashing or hurting it, is to capture it in a jar or a tin box. You put a little cotton ball dabbed with nail polish remover in with the bug and, presto, it dies.

 
Very early Saturday morning, when there was still a little leftover coolness from the night before, Lucky borrowed some cotton balls and half a bottle of nail polish remover from Brigitte’s medicine cabinet. She was making an inventory of her survival kit backpack, which you have to do regularly to be sure you haven’t used up something important for some reason besides actual survival. It was a good time for an inventory, because Brigitte had gone to the Captain’s house to pick up this month’s U.S. Government Surplus food, and Lucky was glad to be able to check out her supplies in private.

  She was starting to spread all her stuff out on the Formica table in the kitchen trailer when she heard a sound like a pig snorting. Then the pig squealed and snorted again. HMS Beagle thumped her tail on the floor and padded to the door.

  “I know it’s you, Miles,” Lucky called through the screen door. She sighed. “Here’s the deal. I’ll tell you one Olden Days of Hard Pan story. You don’t get to make any noises. Then you have to leave.”

  From outside, Miles said, “Does Brigitte have any extra cookies?”

  “How many have you had already?”

  Miles stuck his head in. HMS Beagle’s head came up to Miles’s chin, and the dog was always happy when he visited because she knew she would get plenty of cookie crumbs. Miles was only five, and he was not a neat eater, plus he didn’t mind when HMS Beagle licked his hands.