Cynthia Kadohata - The Thing About Luck

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.

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.