The Higher Power of Lucky

by Susan Patron

  Lucky and HMS Beagle walked up Short Sammy’s path, which was not the kind of path you could stray from because it had old car tires along each side, and each tire had a cactus growing in its center, which made sure you went carefully along straight ahead because your feet were entirely positive of the way with a path like that.

  The house had once been a giant metal water tank until it sprang too many holes and the town bought another one. Sammy got the old one to live in, one big round room with four windows cut out. The door had been sawn out a little unevenly and was hinged with strips of leather. There was no lock on the door, because Short Sammy wasn’t worried about anyone stealing anything except his big black cast-iron frying pan, which was the most valuable thing he owned.

  Lucky thought that Short Sammy’s water tank house was even better as a house than regular houses, because inside you didn’t have the normal impression of straightness and squareness and corners, or of different rooms. Instead it was a very convenient one-room house with a bed, a woodstove where Short Sammy did his winter cooking, a round table, three chairs, a crate full of books with his guitar on top, and nails sticking out on the wall where he hung a calendar, his clothes, and three stained white cowboy hats. He stored some other stuff, like his official Adopt-a-Highway equipment—orange vest, hard hat, and trash bags—in the big trunk of his ’62 Cadillac.

  There was only one picture on the wall—a photograph of a goofy-looking dog’s smiling face that had been exactly fitted into a clean sardine can. The edges of the can made a perfect tiny frame that also looked a little bit like a shrine. Lucky knew it was a snapshot of Sammy’s dog, Roy, who because he didn’t die from a rattlesnake bite got Sammy to quit drinking.

  The floor was made of flat rocks fitted neatly like pieces in a puzzle, with concrete poured into the cracks—it was a floor you could spill things on and not worry. Short Sammy just hosed it off every so often, and when he did it smelled wonderful, a mixture of dust and wet stone.

  Outside there was a hose for washing and showers, a Weber grill for summer cooking, and an outhouse in the back.

  Lucky heard a radio announcer’s smooth radio voice plus Sammy’s growly one as she followed HMS Beagle inside.

  “Man, I tried melting it. Wouldn’t melt. Tried grating it. Turns into dough. It must be some kind of secret weapon,” Short Sammy was saying. In the center of the room, at a rough wooden table that had once been a spool for coiling electrical wire, Lincoln leaned over a small bag of Fritos, eating out of it with a spoon. Nearby on the table was a length of cord with knots in it.

  “Sammy’s been experimenting with the Government Surplus cheese,” Lincoln explained to Lucky. The radio announcer was telling about traffic tie-ups.

  “So far, nobody can figure out what to do with it to make it something you’d want to eat,” Sammy said. He pushed back the brim of his cowboy hat and frowned at the cheese. “The chili’s good, though. Made it with U.S. Government Surplus canned pork. Help yourself.”

  Quite a lot of people, especially Brigitte, had a strong opinion that Short Sammy used too much grease in his cooking. Brigitte insisted that Lucky should very politely say she wasn’t hungry if he offered her anything to eat.

  “Okay, yes, please,” she said. Sammy opened another snack-size bag of Fritos and gave it to Lucky with a tin spoon.

  “Pan’s outside. Lid’s hot.”

  Lucky lifted the lid with a rag, set it on a rock, and spooned beans and pork into the small bag of Fritos. She replaced the lid.

  “…a fender bender,” said the radio announcer, “on the 101 South into downtown L.A. Slow going on the 10 East due to an oil spill in the car-pool lane. Better take the 60 if you can. That three-car pileup on the Pasadena Freeway near the four level has been cleared….”

  Short Sammy poured hot water over coffee grounds in a sock filter and shook his head. “That L.A. traffic is terrible,” he said, sounding pleased. The traffic report always cheered him up. “Today’s Saturday, and it’s as bad as Monday rush hour.” He poured dark black coffee into a tin mug.

  “So what happened with the snake?” Lincoln asked, digging out the last of his chili-and-Fritos and licking the spoon.

  “I scared it away.” Lucky plopped into a chair. “It was a red racer.” Short Sammy’s recipe was a perfect meal because it was extremely delicious, plus no dishes to wash except your spoon and the pan once it was empty.

  Short Sammy turned off the radio even though the traffic report wasn’t over. “Red racers are good people, man,” he said. “They get rid of the rattlers and sidewinders.”

  “I know,” Lucky said. “But Brigitte hates them. This chili is good.”

  Sammy waved at flies with his mug. Then he said a strange thing. “Brigitte’s all right. She just needs something to do. She’s bored.”

  Lucky’s opinion was that Brigitte’s job of being her Guardian was totally already something to do. How could she be bored with that? Plus, except for Lucky’s own work at the Found Object Wind Chime Museum and Visitor Center, the Captain’s mail-sorting job, and Dot’s Baubles ’n’ Beauty Salon, there were no jobs in Hard Pan no matter how much you wanted one.

  “Too bad she can’t open a restaurant or something,” said Lincoln, who loved Brigitte’s French way of making an apple pie. “I bet people would come from Talc Town and all over, plus the caravans of geologists from L.A. and regular tourists.” As Lucky watched, he picked up his cord from the table, then pulled the two ends apart and a whole row of knots came magically undone. Right away he started tying new ones.

  Lucky imagined a restaurant where the menu had things like tongue and sweetbreads, which are really some kind of glands, and oysters and snails and rabbits—things she was pretty sure French people sat around eating morning, noon, and night. She doubted there would be any customers for a restaurant like that in Hard Pan.

  Short Sammy squatted by HMS Beagle, scratching her behind the ears. HMS Beagle loved Short Sammy’s house because the rock floor was very cool to lie on, and because Short Sammy was her best friend after Lucky, ever since he pulled fifteen cactus spines out of her muzzle with his pliers when she was a puppy. “I wonder what they make that cheese out of,” Sammy said.

  Suddenly Lucky got a picture in her mind of the magazines Brigitte’s mother sent from France, with pictures of beautiful castles and houses. “Sammy,” she said, “have you ever been to France?”

  “Sure,” said Short Sammy, “but that was a lifetime ago.”

  Lucky knew he meant before he hit rock bottom, back when he still drank rum and homemade wine.

  “There’s a very famous museum in France,” Lincoln said.

  “Yeah, the Louvre. I remember a café near there,” said Short Sammy.

  “So would you rather live in France or Hard Pan?”

  Short Sammy gave HMS Beagle a final scratch on her belly and squinted up at Lucky from under the brim of his cowboy hat. He stood, knees popping like when you pop your knuckles, and pivoted on the heel of his pointy-toed boot. “Look, man,” he said, and went to a window, which was a large square cut out of the tin wall at exactly the right level to make a frame for Lucky’s face. Short Sammy and Lucky were the same height, except the boots and hat gave him some extra. “Look at that,” he said.

  Lucky looked out at the jumble of trailers, sheds, outhouses, shacks, and rusty vehicles below. Dot was in her backyard hanging small white towels on a clothesline. At the edge of town Lucky’s canned-ham bedroom trailer curled in a half circle with the other trailers it was connected to. “What?” she said, looking for the thing Short Sammy wanted her to see.

  Lincoln came to the open doorway to look out in the same direction.

  “Just Hard Pan,” Short Sammy said. “HP, pop. 43. And everything that isn’t Hard Pan. Look.” Lucky did.

  Past the town the desert rolled out and out like a pale green ocean, as far as you could see, to the Coso foothills, then behind them, the huge black Coso Range like the broken edge of a giant cup th
at held tiny Hard Pan at its bottom. The sky arched up forever, nothing but a sheet of blue, hiding zillions of stars and planets and galaxies that were up there all the time, even when you couldn’t see them. It was kind of peaceful and so gigantic it made your brain feel rested. It made you feel like you could become anything you wanted, like you were filled up with nothing but hope.

  HP, she was thinking. HP stood for Hard Pan, but, she realized, it could also stand for Higher Power. Maybe Hard Pan was Short Sammy’s Higher Power because of its slowness and peacefulness and sweet-smellingness, even though it was old and junky and out in the middle of nowhere. Lucky wondered if she could ever get Brigitte to love Hard Pan as much as she loved France.

  Sammy’s corrugated roof made tiny pinging sounds, almost like raindrops, as it expanded in the sun.

  “The museum I meant,” said Lincoln, “is, I don’t know how you pronounce it, Le Musée Mondial du Nœud. It’s a knot museum. I found out about it in Knot News.”

  Lucky sighed. Her brain was clogged up with questions, and she didn’t even know exactly what they were.

  Short Sammy had gone back to frown at the block of cheese on his table. “The only thing left, man, is to fry this thing in bacon grease,” he said.

  10. The Urn

  On Sunday morning Lucky woke up wanting to ask Lincoln something important. She phoned him, and they decided to meet right after breakfast up at the post office, since it was closed and nobody would be around.

  Lucky wanted to talk to Lincoln about an urn she had. Not everyone who dies gets buried in the ground. Some people are cremated, which Lucky had not known about until her mother died. She found out that being cremated is where they take the dead person to a place called a crematory and put them in a box like a casket. The box goes through a special process—Short Sammy explained this—and afterward all that is left are little particles and ashes.

  Then they put the particles and ashes into something called an urn.

  If you never saw an urn before you would probably think it was a shiny metal vase for flowers, except it has a hinged lid with a latch to keep it solidly closed so nothing can spill out if it gets accidentally knocked over.

  Two days after Brigitte had arrived in Hard Pan with her little suitcase, a strange man in sunglasses and a suit came and gave the urn to Lucky. She had thought that was a mistake, because she was only eight at the time and didn’t know what she was supposed to do with it. So she tried to give it back.

  The strange man had said to her, “These are your mother’s remains. There will be a memorial service where you can fling them to the wind.”

  Lucky had stared at the man. She did not understand what he was talking about.

  That was two years ago. But still now, every so often—and today was one of those times, while she and HMS Beagle trotted to the post office to meet Lincoln—Lucky worried about the urn.

  Seen from a little distance, Lincoln looked better, in Lucky’s opinion—you could imagine how he’d look when he grew into his ears. Like, as he got older his head wouldn’t look as big and his neck would definitely look less scrawny. So far he didn’t look like a president, which was what his mother was hoping and which was why she named him Lincoln Clinton Carter Kennedy. Lucky knew he’d rather be president of the International Guild of Knot Tyers. Mothers have their good sides, their bad sides, and their wacky sides, but Lucky figured Lincoln’s mother had no way of knowing at the time he was born that he would turn out to be so dedicated about knots.

  “Lincoln,” Lucky said, squatting down to look at the lines he’d drawn in the dirt, “do you remember when my mother died?”

  “I don’t remember her very well, but I do remember the…what do you call it. Not the funeral but the—”

  “Memorial.”

  “Yeah. Don’t you remember it?” Lincoln scratched HMS Beagle’s soft chest.

  “Kind of.” It was almost exactly two years ago. Lucky did remember most of it strongly, but she wanted to know what Lincoln would say. “What do you remember about it?”

  Lincoln squinted at her and went back to his sand drawing, which turned out to be some kind of hitch. Even when Lincoln glanced at something for only a tiny second, it was a piercing and thorough glance, like with X-ray eyes. “Everyone in the whole town went,” he said. “All the cars and trucks in a slow line, some dogs following along. It was at the old abandoned dugouts, on the open desert outside town, so there wasn’t any shade. But the sun was going down and it was cooling off and people stood around and Short Sammy played the guitar. He played ‘Amazing Grace’ and everybody sang along and it was really sad and beautiful.” Lincoln frowned at the ground. “I remember how, especially out overlooking the whole desert, there was that special smell from after it—” Lincoln’s cheeks and the tips of his ears suddenly got red.

  Lucky finished what Lincoln was going to say. “After it rains. I know, okay? That smell reminds me, too. You don’t have to completely never mention rain. It wasn’t like it was the rain’s fault that it happened.”

  “Okay,” he said, gouging his lines in the sand more deeply.

  “I was supposed to spread her ashes in the wind,” Lucky said. “Because I was the next of kin.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  Lucky didn’t answer right away. She was remembering that during a secret time in her bedroom, just before the memorial, she had opened the urn to look inside. The particles were like different sizes of whitish sand. But when she looked closely she could tell that they were little pieces of bone.

  Lucky’s hand fit inside the opening at the top of the urn. She had reached in. She was scared and excited, as if doing this was both right and wrong at the same time. Her fingers felt some dry, feathery stuff, and a lot of light, brittle bits.

  They were the remains. The remains of her mother. She had very carefully closed and latched the lid of the urn and put it on her bed. She lay down on her side and curled herself around it.

  At first she lay with one hand touching the urn. But after a while she put her arms all the way around it, like a child hugs a doll or a mother holds a child. Then she sat up and opened the lid again and let some of her tears fall inside. She wanted to mix her tears with the remains of her mother. She didn’t know if this was allowed, so she did it very privately and quietly without telling anyone.

  “Because they were the remains of my mother,” Lucky finally explained.

  Lincoln nodded. “People kept trying to get you to pop the cork off that vase,” he said, “and they kept saying there was such a nice gentle breeze to carry the ashes out into the desert. Everyone wanted to convince you—”

  “Urn,” said Lucky. “It’s called an urn. There was a little group of burros watching us.” There were four of them, standing in profile on the crest of one of the hills by the dugouts, looking down at the people from the sides of their faces.

  Up until then, Lucky hadn’t known about scattering the ashes of a person who died. Someone had explained that people like to give the ashes back to the earth, that it was a way for her mother to become part of the desert and always be near Lucky.

  But that made no sense. If you fling something away, like the remains of your own mother, if you throw those remains out into the desert, how does that make her near to you? Lucky had clutched the urn to her chest and stared at the burros and tried to know what to do.

  Lucky remembered Brigitte’s hand on her shoulder, the type of firm grip you would have if you were trying to keep a puppy from running away. She’d said it was time to go back, and that Lucky could bring the urn and she could keep it. But then all of a sudden Lucky didn’t want it. She shoved it at Brigitte, as if it were only a vase for flowers after all, and ran to sit on Dot’s tailgate so she could ride home backward, watching the burros on the hill until she couldn’t see them anymore.

  “It was your father,” said Lincoln, “who made everyone leave you alone. He said the decision was yours, and whatever it was it would be the right one.”
r />   “My father? My father wasn’t even there! I’ve never even met him!”

  Lincoln’s ears turned red again. “Don’t you remember the tall guy with sunglasses? He was the only one wearing a suit in the heat.”

  “That was the crematory man,” said Lucky, but she could feel something squeezing her heart in her chest. “What do you mean, my father?”

  “I just remember people saying he was Brigitte’s former husband, from before, and I thought that was weird,” said Lincoln. “But then Dot was telling people, ‘Lucky’s father made all the arrangements,’ and pointing to him with her chin like she does.” He stood up and took a few steps back, like he was afraid of what Lucky would do.

  Lucky smeared the knot design with the heel of her sneaker. “That whole deal is so stupid,” she said. “If he was my father, why didn’t he say so?”

  “Listen,” said Lincoln. “Here.” He pulled a knot out of his pocket. It was large and complicated looking, made from blue and green silky cords. “It’s called the Ten-Strand Round knot.”

  It looked like a piece of jewelry, intricate and beautiful. For some reason, this made tears surge into Lucky’s eyes, which was very embarrassing. “Lincoln,” she said. “People think you’re kind of clueless, but you’re really not.”

  “I know I’m…” Lincoln used his stick to write the last word in the dirt road: K-N-O-T.

  Then he showed the stick to HMS Beagle and threw it with a graceful long overhand toss and she ran and caught it in her mouth by leaping into the air, and brought it back to him so he could do it again.

  Lucky cupped Lincoln’s gift in her hand. The neat round buttonlike knot had no cord ends sticking out that might unwind, and you could never in a million years decipher how Lincoln had made it. You’d never find out how he had taken cords that were pretty useless, just lying around in someone’s drawer, and looped and threaded them over and over in a special way until they ended up becoming a beautiful knot.