by Susan Patron
“You mean since today started?” he asked.
“Come in and close the screen before the flies get in,” said Lucky, cramming her survival stuff back into the backpack. “Yes, how many cookies have you had since you got up this morning?”
Miles had to push HMS Beagle a little bit because she was smelling him very thoroughly.
“Does banana nut bread count?” he asked as he came in, taking tiny steps so as not to touch any of the cracks on the linoleum floor. He dragged a plastic Buy-Mor-Store grocery bag.
“Who gave you banana nut bread? Dot?”
Even though Dot was the bossiest and crabbiest person in Hard Pan, Miles could always mooch a cookie off her.
“Yeah. She said she hoped there would be butter with the free Government food today so she could make new banana nut bread, because her old banana nut bread was kind of dry. But I told her I like it dry, so she gave me some and it was pretty good.” Miles wiped his grimy hands on his shorts, which were darker on the sides. He took a worn copy of Are You My Mother? and a greasy folded paper towel out of the plastic bag.
“I could trade you this for a cookie,” he said, unfolding the paper towel on the table. Ever since Lucky had told him he was a mooch, he always offered a trade of some kind. Miles had long eyelashes, big round chocolate-chip eyes, and wavy orangey hair. His fingernails were as dark as if he had been changing the oil in a car. He offered the half-eaten piece of banana nut bread. “It’s really good,” he said.
“Okay,” said Lucky, although it wasn’t much of a trade.
Miles said happily, “What kind does Brigitte have? Does she have any mint Milanos? Then will you read me my book?”
Lucky lowered her backpack to the floor and slid out of the banquette. She had read Are You My Mother? to him about a thousand times. “Listen, Miles. I already said what the deal is: I’ll tell you one Olden Days of Hard Pan story, and no noises from you. I’m not reading that book again. Got it?”
“Yeah,” Miles said. “My favorite Olden Days of Hard Pan stories are when Chesterfield the Burro is in them.” He folded his lips inside for a second to show he knew she meant business about making noises. Then he said, “She keeps the cookies in that blue box in the cupboard.”
Miles had done a thorough cookie-availability check with everyone in town at one time or another. He was an expert on who had what kind of cookies, who would give him one, and where they stored them. He made his cookie rounds every day.
Dot’s Baubles ’n’ Beauty Salon was next to Miles’s house, so her back door was his first stop of the day. Usually she’d be in her kitchen, where she had her homemade jewelry for sale and her Beauty Salon, with chairs on the back porch for people to sit in while their curlers got dry. Sometimes Miles let Dot wash his hair as a trade for the cookies. If she had a kind he really loved, like mint Milanos, he let her give him a haircut.
Lucky handed Miles a Fig Newton. He ate it in small bites, gently thumping his heels against the banquette. He rested his bare feet on Lucky’s survival kit backpack under the table.
“Don’t mash my survival kit,” Lucky said.
“I won’t,” he said, and then asked, “What kind of stuff do you have in there?”
“Things you need if you get lost or stuck out in the desert.”
“Like what? A map?”
Lucky hadn’t thought of having a map before. If you were lost it wouldn’t help to have a map, because you didn’t know where you were in the first place. “No, like a good book that you can read to not be bored.”
Miles nodded. “Like Are You My Mother?” he said. “What other stuff—cookies?”
“Uh-uh. You can’t keep anything like chocolate, because it melts. You really need things like specimen boxes in case you find some good spiders or insects, plus nail polish remover, mineral oil, and stuff for scientific studies.”
“Will Chesterfield the Burro be in the Olden Days of Hard Pan story?”
“Yes,” said Lucky. “It happened when Hard Pan was still a mining town, in the century before last. You have to pretend I lived back then, and I was your age, or maybe six.”
“I’m five and a half.” Miles made a noise like a helicopter.
“No noises, Miles.”
“I forgot. Were there dinosaurs in the Olden Days story?”
“No, this was after the dinosaurs. I was teaching HMS Beagle to heel.” Hearing her name, HMS Beagle thumped her tail on the floor. “She was still a puppy. We went down the dirt road like if you’re going to the old dump”—Lucky gestured to the open desert that began at the edge of their half circle of trailers. Miles looked out the small window toward the purple Coso Mountains hundreds of miles away.
“The Beag wanted to smell everything. I remember there was a whole flock of chukars running in front of us—”
Miles made a chuck-karr chuck-karr chuck-karr noise, exactly like the birds. He kept doing it until Lucky said, “Yeah, those. You can never catch one because as soon as you get close, they fly a little bit away. But HMS Beagle kept trying, because they’re ground birds and can’t fly too far at once. The dirt road got to be a little trail, and then we came to the dugouts.”
“The old miners’ caves? Where I’m not allowed to go?”
“Uh-huh. We thought the caves were a perfect place for our secret home.”
“My grandma says they’re full of black widow spiders.”
“Well, maybe, but we had more important things on our minds. We found this one cave that had an old tin cup and coffee pot and a wooden crate you could sit on, and a little fire pit with a grill. They were still mining silver up the hill and Hard Pan was a boomtown with hundreds of people. One day we went up to the mine and I got a job as a dynamiter because I was small enough to crawl into dangerous holes where no one else could fit. You know the reason they call the town Hard Pan?”
Miles shook his head.
“Because the ground is so hard you can’t get a shovel in it. It’s like cement. You have to use dynamite to dig. Well, I became the top dynamiter up at the mine because I could light the fuse and then get out fast before it blew.
“Our dugout was perfect because there was no rent to pay and people left us alone. We had our own burro named Chesterfield that I rode to my job at the mine, and HMS Beagle got to jump on and ride too.”
Miles broke off tinier and tinier pieces of Fig Newton, as if he could make the story last as long as he still had some cookie left. “Was Chesterfield a boy or a girl burro?”
“Girl. I once saved her life when she was a filly, so she lived with us in the cave and never tried to run away. She had sweet breath from eating tamarisk blossoms and locust tree flowers, and she politely went away from the cave to go to the bathroom.”
Lucky looked up at the arched wooden ceiling of the kitchen trailer and narrowed her eyes, like someone remembering something from long ago. “While I was at work dynamiting for silver in the mine, Chesterfield went to be with the other burros, but she was always waiting for me at five o’clock on the dot when my shift ended.
“But one day a big timber fell on me and I was trapped. I told HMS Beagle, ‘Go get Chesterfield, quick, before this fuse blows me to smithereens!’ and she ran.
“Well, turns out Chesterfield was way, way out in the desert looking for a special yellow-flowered plant she loves. HMS Beagle had to look everywhere. I lay there squished under the timber, and the other miners were saying prayers because they thought I was a goner for sure. Finally I heard Chesterfield galloping up to the mine. The fuse had this far to go”—Lucky held up her little finger—“before it would get to the end and explode.
“HMS Beagle gave one end of a rope to Chesterfield and ran into my hole with the other end. She was still small enough to fit, being a puppy. I held my end tight and Chesterfield pulled with her teeth. She pulled and pulled with all her might. Finally I slid out and the Beag and I jumped on Chesterfield’s back and we made it safely back to the dugouts. After that I quit my job at the mine even
though the big boss owner begged me to come back. Then we lived very happily in our dugout for a long time, until we used up everything in the survival kit and decided to come home.”
“Then what happened? Did Chesterfield die?”
“Of course not,” said Lucky. “She decided to have a baby burro. So HMS Beagle and I told her it was better to return to the wild and live among her own kind. She’s still there, with her husband and child. Sometimes if there is a person in trouble out in the desert, she’ll suddenly appear, and if she likes them she’ll give them a ride to safety.”
Miles held a crumb of Fig Newton in two fingers. He gazed just beyond Lucky. Finally he whispered, “Would she let me ride her?”
“She might,” said Lucky.
Miles blinked, looked at the last crumb, and slowly licked it from his fingers. He wiped his hands on the sides of his pants. “Could you read me Are You My Mother? now?”
“No! The deal was one Olden Days story, plus you got a cookie. Time to go.” Lucky clomped to the screen door and opened it.
Miles put his head down on the table. “I traded you for the cookie,” he said in a tragic, muffled voice.
“Out, Miles.”
Very slowly, as if his head were made of heavy metal, Miles looked up. There was a little oval of sweat on the Formica where his head had been. He gave Lucky the same exact look as HMS Beagle when she wanted a piece of bacon. “Could you just read the part about the Snort?”
Lucky had a little place in her heart where there was a meanness gland. The meanness gland got active sometimes when Miles was around. She knew that he knew he had to do what Lucky wanted, because if he didn’t, she’d never be nice to him. Sometimes, with that meanness gland working, Lucky liked being mean to Miles.
“No,” she said. Miles’s head fell back onto the table.
“Chuck-karr, chuck-karr, chuck-karr,” he warbled, a lost wild baby bird. Lucky noticed how small the thumb-sized hollow was at the back of his neck. “Please, please, please,” he moaned, “tell me the story of how Brigitte came to Hard Pan.”
As Brigitte’s Jeep pulled up outside, Lucky said, “Oh, get Brigitte to tell you.” When he looked up with his whole face filled with gladness, Lucky’s meanness gland felt better, like a heavy timber had rolled off it.
6. How Brigitte Came
Brigitte swung up the steps to the kitchen trailer carrying two plastic sacks full of Government Surplus commodities. “Even though it is only eight o’clock, I do not want to see the temperature in centigrade,” she said. “If I see it only in Fahrenheit I am not so shocked—I do not let myself know what it really means. Miles, do you want to wash your hands?”
“No, thank you,” said Miles. Lucky watched as Brigitte pulled Government food out of the sacks: canned pork, canned apricots, butter, and a chunk of something orange.
“What’s this stuff? Cheese?” she asked, picking up the orangey brick-shaped thing packaged in a waxed box like a milk carton. It said UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE on the wrapping. It felt soft.
The last Saturday of the month, free Government food got delivered to the town. You only received free Government food if you had quite a small amount of money. If you had too much money, they wouldn’t give any food to you. Most people in Hard Pan didn’t have regular jobs, and maybe they got a check every month out of having a disability or being old or from fathers who didn’t like children, but it wasn’t very much. Most everyone in Hard Pan qualified for the free food.
“We will see,” said Brigitte, slitting the carton with a small knife. She sniffed the cheese. Lucky leaned in and smelled it too. Usually the kind of cheese that Brigitte loved smelled like dirty socks and had to be tightly wound in Saran Wrap so it didn’t smell up the whole fridge. This cheese had no smell at all.
“I do not know about this cheese,” said Brigitte, frowning. She cut off a small corner and held it out to HMS Beagle. HMS Beagle stretched her neck forward, her black nose almost touching the piece of cheese. She studied it with her nose twitching, then sighed and turned back to her place by the door.
Brigitte made a pfff sound, a little blast of air, and tossed the small corner of cheese in the garbage can.
“No wonder it is free, that cheese,” she said. “No one will pay for it.”
Miles began pounding his heels against the banquette. “Lucky said you would tell me the story of how you came to Hard Pan to take care of her,” he said.
Brigitte shrugged. “You know already, Miles. I come on the airplane after Lucky’s mother died.”
“Why didn’t Lucky’s father take care of her himself?” asked Miles.
Brigitte poofed air out of her mouth in a way she did to show she thought something was ridiculous. “He is,” she said, “in some ways, a very foolish man, Lucky’s father.”
Miles looked at Lucky to see if she agreed with this or not. Lucky stuck her face closer to his and made big-eyes at him as a way of telling him to shut up. Miles stuck his face out and made big-eyes back at her as a way of saying he still wanted to know if Lucky agreed that her father was foolish.
Lucky said, “So my father called up his first wife, who he was married to before he got married to my mother. And guess who that was?”
Miles stared at her. “Who?” he said.
“Brigitte!” said Lucky.
“Her?” asked Miles. He turned to Brigitte, hugging his Buy-Mor-Store bag to his chest. He frowned at her and then at Lucky to show he didn’t want to be teased.
“Of course, me,” said Brigitte. She glanced up at a shiny metal thing like a vase on a high shelf. Lucky knew what was in it, but her mind did not like to stay thinking about it. Her brain went hopping off, like someone crossing a stream by jumping from stone to stone, quickly, so they wouldn’t have time to think about slipping and falling into the water.
“If Brigitte was married to Lucky’s father, then she is Lucky’s stepmother,” Miles said.
Lucky felt a little bit hypnotized, as if she were apart from her self and the self leaning on the sink was a totally other self. “No,” she said slowly. “Because they were married before.”
“Lucky’s father and I were married before Lucky was born, Miles,” Brigitte explained. “Her mother, Lucille, and I did not know one another. But Lucky’s father called me because he knew I would come.” She shrugged. “In France I have no job. Always I want to see California. He knew I will take care of Lucky for a while.
“So I agree. I say to him, ‘You buy me the ticket and I will come.’ ‘I have already the flight booked,’ he said. ‘You leave Paris tonight and arrive in Los Angeles tomorrow.’ So I fly to Los Angeles with my red silk dress and high-heeled shoes and only my one little suitcase.”
“What happened when you got to Los Angeles?” Miles asked. Lucky knew that Miles thought L.A. was a terrible place where people drove around in their cars all day, from morning to night. He and Short Sammy spent hours listening to L.A. traffic reports on the radio.
“Lucky’s father has rented a big American car that is waiting for me at the airport,” Brigitte said. “I drive and drive and drive and finally the city ends and the desert starts. Then I drive and drive and drive”—Brigitte air-drove a car, her hands gripping a pretend steering wheel—“until there is no more people, only desert, a lot of desert! I am a little frightened because there is too much space everywhere, and I almost drive into a cow and her little veal….”
“Her little calf,” Lucky said.
“Yes, the cow and her little calf. They are in the middle of the highway! Finally I drive until there is no more road, only dirt streets. There is a little sign, ‘Hard Pan, Pop. 43,’ and I am sad because Lucky’s maman has died, so now it is Pop. 42.”
They never changed the sign, though, Lucky realized. But because Brigitte came, it was still a true sign after all.
Brigitte squeezed into the banquette next to Miles.
“Did you find Lucky then?”
“No. When I get out of the car I see
that it is very, very hot—as hot as today, but I had not ever been so hot in France.” Brigitte told the story in her excited French way, which was a way, Lucky thought, that made people listen more thoroughly. “So I go up to this house and it has a glass tower on the roof. I do not know it is the Captain’s house, of course. I do not know any person in America except Lucky’s father, who is in San Francisco. I am afraid to speak bad English, so I do not know what will happen. The man at the door has long gray hair and he is wearing some kind of big shirt with a rope for the waist. His dusty leather sandals and his beard make him seem like a person from the Bible.”
“The Captain doesn’t look from the Bible,” said Miles. “He looks normal.”
“To me, my first day in America, he looks actually like someone who has lost his marble. Later, I discover how nice he is, when he drives us back from Sierra City in his van after we return the rental car.”
“Don’t they have people like the Captain in France?” asked Miles.
“Not exactly,” said Brigitte. “Next what happens is I say, ‘Lucky?’ and I explain everything in French, but he does not understand. Then he says, ‘Oh! Oh! LUCK-y!’ because I have been saying this name with my accent the way I did before, ‘LU-key.’ Then he takes me up the hill to an old metal tank with a door in the front.”
“Short Sammy’s water tank!” Miles said.
“Yes, and Sammy comes out, but I do not know who he is. I see a tiny man with a hat like a cowboy—but a miniature cowboy. I think, no one has told me America is so strange.”
Lucky remembered this part brilliantly because she had been there, peering out from inside Sammy’s water tank house. Her first sight of Brigitte reminded Lucky of the beautiful ladies on Short Sammy’s calendar. Every month there was a different lady, looking very sparkly and smiley, and not wearing too many clothes. Brigitte’s dress fit her more like a bright red slip, except the twirly skirt gave you thoughts of dancing. Plus her blond hair was shiny and bouncy, and her lipstick was the perfect, exact same red as her dress. Her high-heeled shoes and creamy clean neck made Brigitte look way too French, and too…fancy for Hard Pan.