The Thing About Luck

by Cynthia Kadohata

  Maybe that was why I kept thinking about A Separate Peace. Gene was jealous of Finny, and then one day he acted on that jealousy by shaking the branch so that Finny fell to the ground. I had decided that Gene shook the branch on purpose. I didn’t want to do something horrible like that in the future. It scared me that I might have evil inside of me. That was why I never argued when Jiichan said I should try to meditate and do my breathing exercises. This would help me to open up my heart more.

  I closed my eyes again.

  After a long time I heard Mick on the radio saying we had reached the motel Mrs. Parker had booked for us.

  “We’re going to drop the machines at the farm,” Mick said. “It’s a bit up the road. Yukiko, why don’t ya get our rooms? Tosh, ya ought to come to the farm after ya drop yer family off.”

  Jiichan pulled into a gravel lot below a sign reading WHEATLAND MOTEL. A small group of people were just leaving the motel. They were probably wheaties like us. I could tell somehow.

  I stayed in the pickup because I had just decided to follow Jiichan around all day to make sure he was okay. Jaz got out with Obaachan and cried loudly into the wind, “For I am the great LEGO builder Jaz Miyamoto! I come to conquer your state!” When we reached the farm, Rory was already unloading a combine. Then he got in a semi without a word and set off for Texas again. Mr. Dark climbed into a pickup and drove off. I had no idea how everyone was operating on so little sleep.

  Jiichan put a weird trying-to-appear-fine grin on his face. Mick cut a swath of wheat with a combine, then climbed into the bin with a moisture meter. “Too moist,” he called out. We hopped back into the pickup and returned to the motel to check in and sleep while the wheat dried.

  Obaachan and Jaz were sitting on a bench outside the office. She got up when she saw us and handed Mick his keycard. “Let’s meet in two hours, then I’ll check the moisture again,” Mick said.

  Jiichan nodded. He usually walked with perfect posture, but now his shoulders slumped. I held on to his hand as we walked to our room. Obaachan and Jiichan immediately got into bed, so Jaz and I unloaded the pickup. We’d brought bottles of water, two thermoses of coffee, and one suitcase apiece. We weren’t expecting to be here very long.

  It seemed as if I had just fallen asleep when I heard knocking. I staggered sleepily to the door. When I opened up, Mick stood there looking exhausted, looking, in fact, a lot like my family.

  “The wheat’s ready,” he said. “Mr. Franklin called. He’s waiting at the farmhouse for us.” He held up a thermos. “I don’t know how Americans drink so much coffee. Awful stuff, but it does wake a man up.”

  “Do you want to wait in here?” I asked him. “We’ll just be a few minutes.”

  “I’ll wait outside.”

  Obaachan was already up and dressed in fresh clothes. She was the Incredible Sleepless Woman. She was listening to music on an MP3 player. She liked Bruce Springsteen. Go figure. It was pretty funny when she cried out lyrics like “Take a knife and cut this pain from my heart!” She took one of the thermoses and filled the cap with coffee. “Tosh,” she said. “Sorry, very sorry, but you have work now.”

  Jiichan opened his eyes but didn’t move. He finally sat up. “This worst moment of my life,” he said before getting out of bed. I felt so bad for him. We had all gone to sleep fully dressed. He went to use the bathroom before walking out without changing. Obaachan and I followed him. She would need to take the pickup back and forth from the motel to the big rig as she alternately went to the elevator and relaxed in the motel. I let Thunder stay in the motel because I didn’t want any trouble.

  Several acres’ length away, we approached a farmhouse. There was a man sitting on the porch, a shotgun on his lap. The only reason to have a shotgun was to hunt, and I was pretty sure he wasn’t doing any hunting, sitting on the porch. Obaachan waited in the pickup.

  The man stood up. “Parker Harvesting?”

  “We are,” Mick said. He put out his hand. “I be Mick. This be Toshiro.”

  “I never seen a Chinese wheatie before,” the farmer said, eyeing Jiichan.

  “Japanese,” I piped up extra politely when Jiichan or Mick didn’t correct him. I don’t know why, but I felt like I had to use my best manners with people who didn’t deal with many Asians. I felt like I was representing the whole Asian race. The farmer looked at me closely and didn’t move his gaze. “You just stuck your finger into an electric socket?” he said. I remembered my hair. Then he smiled. I smiled back.

  “You Irish?” he said to Mick.

  “I am.”

  “Seen those before. We had two from South Africa last year.”

  “Did ya, then?” Mick said.

  The farmer checked his watch. “You’re sure it’s ready?”

  “I am.”

  “You’re looking a little ragged. Hope you have enough energy to do this job.”

  “We do,” Mick said.

  Jiichan came to life. “We hard worker.”

  “Well, have at it. I got almost fifteen hundred acres here, and it’s supposed to rain this weekend. It’s gonna be close. I figure you’re each gonna have to cut close to twenty acres an hour.”

  “We’ll be getting started, then,” Mick said.

  The farmer returned to his seat. I could feel his eyes on us as we headed back to the pickup. They felt like heat on my back. Farmers could be very intense people during harvest.

  “What did he have a gun for?” I asked when we were out of hearing distance.

  “Many crazy people in America. I don’t know why,” Jiichan answered.

  I waved to Obaachan and she drove off. “You don’t know why there are so many crazy people in America, or you don’t know why he had a gun?” I asked. “Oh, no! I forgot my DEET.” I felt for a moment that I couldn’t breathe.

  “Go back to motel,” Jiichan told me.

  “Will someone drive me back there in the big rig?” I implored. “Please? I want to ride with Jiichan.”

  Mick appraised me with a harsh face. We were all already perspiring. I wiped my arm across my face and then wiped my arm on my shorts.

  “Ya’re going to have to walk. We’re on a deadline,” Mick replied.

  I really disliked that man, even if he was right.

  I scanned the farm. The field sloped gently on the south side. It looked like windblown sand beneath the bright sky.

  I had to decide whether I should ride with Jiichan or walk back to the motel to get my DEET. Jiichan climbed up the combine, and I followed. “Are you sure you can do this?” I asked him.

  He stared straight ahead, his lips pressed together. “I hard worker.”

  “I know you are, but you’re sick.”

  Instead of replying, he pushed the key into the ignition and blew the horn twice, which you were always supposed to do before you moved a combine, to warn anyone standing around to get out of the way.

  The passenger seat was really uncomfortable, so I folded my legs on the chair. The Parkers made sure every combine had a flashlight, a banana for potassium, and a bottle of water at all times. I held the banana up to Jiichan, and he shook his head. He turned on the air-conditioning and closed his eyes as the cold air washed over us.

  Every time I’d ever climbed into a combine, I felt small. It was like riding on a small house. Jiichan honked the horn twice again. The machine was trembling. He pulled to the side of where Mick had already begun cutting. He had left us a strip of uncut wheat at the edge of the field.

  When I turned back to Jiichan, he was pushing the throttle lever to five miles an hour. I thought about Robbie. If he liked that Laskey girl better than me, then that was the way it was. But why did he have to say what he said the way he said it? Then my mind wandered back to mosquitoes. They’d been around for thirty million years. I had read once that supposedly if you put all the ants in the world together, they would weigh more than all the humans in the world. I wondered if that was also true of mosquitoes. My father said that was the problem with me—
I wondered too much and filled my head with nonsense about mosquitoes. He thought that was because having malaria hurt not only my body but also my mind, and it might take a long time for my mind to heal. If I didn’t meditate, maybe my mind would never heal, Jiichan had added.

  I remembered again how my dog Shika had known she was about to die. When I had malaria, I could think, but it was like I was thinking with a different brain than my normal brain. And then something happened—the medicine defeated the parasites, I guess. So I didn’t die. And then when I was completely well, I was a different kid—a kid who knew I could die. Before that, I never thought about dying at all.

  I looked up and saw that Mick was driving by our side. I waved at him, but he didn’t wave back.

  “Funny feeling,” Jiichan said out of the blue.

  “What?”

  “Funny feeling,” he said again. I waited for an explanation, but none came. Then a minute later he put the combine into idle. He seemed to be deep in thought.

  “I may need break,” he said.

  For a second I didn’t know if he meant “break” or “brake.”

  “Feeling funny.”

  “What do you need?” I asked, suddenly alert.

  “I just need to sit and think.”

  The radio came to life. “Everything all right, then?” Mick asked.

  Jiichan picked up the speaker. “Everything fine. I just thinking.”

  “Thinking, ya said?”

  “Yes, I need thinking.”

  Mick didn’t reply, and Jiichan engaged the combine again. We hit a patch of weeds. I could smell them being cut up and shot out the back, and I could hear the combine grumble as the weeds went through the machinery.

  I looked at Jiichan’s gloomy face. He was a happy man. I had rarely seen him so gloomy. It made me want to cry. Jiichan seemed to be weighing his options. But he didn’t speak again.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A few hours later Obaachan, Jaz, and Thunder rode into the field in the pickup. Obaachan’s handbag was full of vending machine goodies: trail mix, candy bars, Fritos, water, and other drinks. “Now, there’s a nutritious meal,” Mick said, biting into a Snickers. Jiichan drank some Gatorade, but he said he didn’t feel like eating. I ate some stale trail mix.

  Once we were ready to return to work, Obaachan asked, “How you feel, old man?”

  Jiichan swatted at the air in annoyance.

  Obaachan drove off to take the cut grain to the elevator. Thunder howled out the window. Sometimes he did that when we were separated.

  Jiichan and I climbed back into the combine, and he drove without comment. Things were going smoothly except that sometimes Jiichan’s jaw was slack and his head tilted slightly. I knew he would like nothing better than to climb into bed. It was around five when we took our next break, and I could still feel the warm air on my face. We stood together in the middle of the field, the wind blowing hard around us. Jiichan reached for the sky and leaned back with his eyes closed. I focused on the air, searching for mosquitoes. But there were none.

  After a few minutes we returned to the combine. My grandfather started the engine, honked twice, and then sat there for at least a full minute. Then he said, “I no can drive no more.” He sunk down in his seat. “Turn off.”

  “Me?” I leaned over and carefully took hold of a lever. I pulled the lever back into middle position. I saw out the glass that Mick was driving on. The farmer’s fields were long and somewhat narrow.

  “Your obaachan drive when her neck hurt, I should drive when I sick. But she stronger than me. Tell Mick I need quit now. Cannot do more.”

  I gingerly picked up the radio. “My grandfather is finished.”

  “Is he all right, then?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied honestly.

  “You drive back to pickup,” Jiichan said. “I no can. Then you drive me in pickup to motel.”

  Doubt fluttered through me. “But the pickup is a stick shift,” I said. “I don’t think I can drive it.” In Kansas you could get your learner’s permit at age fourteen. So I’d practiced driving with my father, but our pickup was an automatic. I looked at the expanse of wheat still uncut. I looked at the sky, which was getting overcast. I hoped the rains didn’t come early. I looked at Jiichan.

  “Then drive me in combine to motel,” he said.

  My heart was pounding as I climbed out onto the platform, Jiichan following. Then we got back into the combine, me first, sitting behind the steering wheel, him in the passenger seat. I felt very small. I suddenly knew what it must feel like to be a mouse. I took the combine out of idle and slowly headed across the field toward the pickup. I checked Mick’s combine through the side mirror.

  The land here was more terraced than the land on the Laskey farm. This made the going slower. There was no way one combine could cut all the wheat that was here in only a few days. Even though it was a small farm, right then it seemed like the biggest farm in the world. The combine shook as I rolled into a trench hidden beneath the remnants of cut wheat. That shook me up, and I had to go into idle again.

  Jiichan had closed his eyes. “Jiichan?” I said, but he didn’t answer. When we reached the pickup, I turned off the combine and just sat there. With Jiichan asleep, I wasn’t sure what to do. On the farm across the street, I saw someone else’s combines driving through the wheat fields. I wondered if we would have to offer our job to them in order to be finished on time. And if we did that, how much would it cost the Parkers? And would they dock our pay? I pocketed the key so nobody could steal the combine.

  The radio came to life. “Is he quitting, then?”

  “Yes,” I answered. “He wants me to drive him to the motel in the combine.”

  “I’ll handle it,” Mick said. “Just wait there.”

  I sat and watched Mick bring his combine in. He climbed down the ladder, hopping down the last few rungs and hurrying over before climbing up our combine. He flung open the door and studied Jiichan, who appeared to be sleeping.

  “I won’t be able to get him down the ladder. Can ya wake him?” Mick asked.

  “Sure.” I shook Jiichan gently. That didn’t work, so I leaned over and said, “Jiichan? Jiichan!” His head rolled over to the left. “Mick’s here. He can take us to the motel in the pickup.”

  Jiichan opened his eyes. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you, Mick.”

  When we got back to the motel, Mick helped Jiichan into our room, where he crumpled into his bed. “Let me know if ya need anything,” Mick said. “Here, write down my cell phone number.”

  I got a pen and wrote his number on a Wheatland Motel pad of paper. Then he was gone. I sat on the bed I was sharing with Jaz. Obaachan, Jaz, and Thunder were still at the elevator. In a minute the phone rang, startling me.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “It’s Mr. Parker.”

  “Hi!”

  “Is your grandfather going back to work?”

  Mick must have just called him. “Uh, not exactly. I mean, not right at this moment.”

  “Tell him we don’t have much time.”

  I glanced at the clock—it was almost six in the evening.

  “He’s going back out tonight,” I lied. “He didn’t get enough sleep.” I just felt like I wanted to get off the phone.

  “A short rest is acceptable,” Mr. Parker said crisply. “But tell him to try to make it short. Can you do that? It’s just a nap he needs?”

  “I hope so,” I said honestly.

  Mr. Parker sighed, then fell silent.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Que sera, sera,” he finally answered. I knew that song: Whatever will be, will be. The future’s not ours to see, que sera, sera. “If he’s too sick, of course he shouldn’t go back out. Don’t mind me. Let me know either way, if he goes back out today or doesn’t. I’d like to keep all my customers happy if possible. Okay, bye.”

  “Bye.”

  I could almost feel Mr. Parker’s torment pulling him every which wa
y. Be nice, be firm, be nice, be firm. Take care of the people, take care of the crops.

  I went outside with some homework. I looked around. I missed Thunder. A mosquito landed on my arm, and I scrambled up, screaming. A man opened the door of the office down the way. “Was that you?” he called out.

  “It was nothing.”

  “A scream like that for nothing?”

  “It was . . . a mosquito.”

  He just stared at me for a moment before returning to the office.

  I went inside our room, took a shower, and spread DEET all over myself. My stomach hurt. If we messed up this job, how would we pay our mortgage? If we lost the house, where would we live? I took out my journal and a pen and sat on the floor, using the closed toilet as a table.

  One of our essay assignments was to write about who we would like to be if we weren’t ourselves. This didn’t quite make sense as an assignment, because you couldn’t know who you really wanted to be until you tried out life from their point of view for a while. But I attempted to do the best I could.

  If I could be anyone else in the world, it would be, my grandfather. He is sixty-seven years, four months, and three days old. He is from Japan. He came here because my mother was born in the United States during a long visit he was taking with my grandmother. My mother was a preemee and they were scared, she might die the doctor said. But she did not. My grandfather is a combine driver. There are probably, maybe, approximately three thousand combine drivers working right now in America this very summer. Maybe less. That’s not too many. They work hard. But I wouldn’t would not be a good combine driver because

  Suddenly, I couldn’t remember if it was my new teacher or my old one who didn’t like contractions. I stopped. I had an idea. I mean, it was a really big idea. It was such a big idea that my hands started shaking. I couldn’t concentrate on my homework anymore. The front door opened, startling me. I stepped into the main room. Thunder’s paws went galumph galumph on the floor as he ran to fling himself at me. “Thunder, Thunder, I missed you!” I knelt beside him and held him close. Obaachan tossed a few plastic-wrapped sandwiches onto the bed I was sharing with Jaz. Jaz had mayonnaise on his upper lip. He always squeezed his sandwiches too hard.