Cynthia Kadohata - The Thing About Luck

I pulled up close to it and pressed the auger-out button to release the auger. As the controls indicated that my combine was emptying, I leaned back and closed my eyes. I felt so gratified and excited. Me, Summer, I was doing this! I leaned over and hugged Thunder. Suddenly, Mick cried out over the radio. “Summer, ya’re missing the trailer! Stop dumping!”

“What!” I jabbed the button to stop the dumping, then scrambled onto the platform.

No. It couldn’t be. I was paralyzed with panic. There was a pile of wheat on the ground. I couldn’t think what I should do besides stand there and stare.

When my brain started working again, I rushed into the cab and brought in the auger. I leaned over the steering wheel to compose myself. I was here. Now. And I couldn’t escape. I had pulled up my combine a few inches too short of the grain trailer.

I didn’t want to go out and see exactly how much wheat I had spilled. I didn’t want to, but I had to. Obaachan, the Parkers, Mick, Mr. Franklin—they would all be furious at me. And Jiichan would be very disappointed. Then I remembered Jiichan’s advice: If you ever do something bad, you have to try to hurry through it, get it over with.

I turned off the ignition, grabbed the flashlight, and pushed open the door. I paused to enjoy one more second of not seeing up close what I had done. Then I descended a couple of steps down the ladder and jumped down the rest of the way, Thunder following. I could smell the cut wheat. Ordinarily, that would be a good smell, except now what I was smelling was spilled wheat, wheat I had let fall to the ground. I kept thinking over and over that I couldn’t escape. Then I saw it: a mountain of wheat on the ground. I leaned against the combine, pushing back tears, then climbed quickly back into the cab and picked up the radio. “Mick?”

“What, Summer?”

“It’s terrible!” I said. “There’s so much wheat on the ground!” My voice sounded squeaky.

“Be right there.”

I rushed down again. The combine’s headlights lit up the night, cutting sharp shadows into the field. The pile of fallen wheat seemed to be taunting me.

I wished I could hurry through this, but at the moment there was nothing to do. I stared at the pile. It looked like about twenty or thirty bushels. The farmer would blow a gasket if he saw his precious wheat spilled. He spent the entire year working toward this moment!

When Mick reached me, he quickly assessed the situation. “Looks like about sixty bushels,” he said. It was even worse than I’d thought!

“I have to lie down for a second,” I said. I lay in the fetal position. In the scheme of things, this wasn’t so bad, was it? Wars were worse. Getting hurt was worse. Malaria was worse. I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see anything. I tried to concentrate on not seeing the usual mess of shapes in my head. I just wanted darkness and peace. Instead I saw the header turning through the wheat. I could hear its roar as well. It almost felt as if I would never see or hear anything else.

I pushed myself up and waited for Mick to tell me how stupid I was. He said crisply, “Not to worry. Not to worry. I’ll get the shovel from the pickup. All I need to do is shovel the wheat onto the header and turn on the combine. But we’ll have to pick up the rest by hand. That’s what’ll take the time.” He stared at the spilled wheat for a second before repeating, “That’s what’ll take the time.” He jogged toward the pickup but stopped to call out, “Ya move the header closer to the wheat.”

I grunted as I pushed and lifted Thunder up to the combine’s platform. I didn’t want him loose where he might get caught in the header. I climbed up after him and backed up the combine so the header was closer to the spilled grain. When I turned off the combine again, I just sat up there as Mick plunged the shovel into the wheat, again and again and again.

I wished there were some sand around, so I could stick my head under it. My life just stank, totally and completely. I was nothing but a nuisance. I leaned my head against the side window, and an overwhelming feeling of loneliness washed over me. Then I suddenly thought about Jaz, and I wondered if this was how lonely he felt almost all the time. That thought made me feel like throwing up.

I saw the stars, the sliver of the moon, and I thought wearily that tomorrow night I would be needed again. “Rise to the occasion!” my father sometimes shouted at an athlete on TV. That’s what I had to do.

Mick stopped shoveling and signaled me to turn on the header. I complied, and then I turned off the combine as he started shoveling again. We did this over and over.

I eagerly clambered down to see if all the wheat was gone. I was pretty disappointed: There was still a very visible amount of wheat on the ground. The trailer was parked on a grassy area. It would have been better if the spill had happened in an area filled with cut straw. That way the wheat that remained on the ground wouldn’t be so visible. The grains of wheat were about the size of grains of rice. The wheat looked terrible lying there in the grass. Mr. Franklin would be furious.

Mick kicked angrily at the ground and muttered something under his breath. “We got three-quarters of it up—we’ll have to leave this for now,” he then said to me. “The time that it’ll take to pick up the rest is better spent driving the combines. We need to maximize the amount of wheat we can save for Franklin. Look, the trailer will be almost full by the time I dump my load. I was almost full when I called ya. So let me dump, then we’ll clean the combines and call it a night. I’m too banjaxed to keep cutting.” Mick ran a hand through his hair. “Ahhh. I’ll clean yers as well or maybe I’ll skip it. Why don’t ya go back to the motel.”

He didn’t seem annoyed with me, I realized with relief. “Thank you,” I said.

“It’s all my job.”

“Still, thank you. Good night.” I couldn’t believe he didn’t want to kill me.

“Summer, don’t worry,” he said kindly. “Ya did a decent job cutting.”

I watched him walk back to his combine and then honk twice, though who would be out there this time of night I didn’t know. I wondered how much longer Mick would be up working. It seemed like a thousand years ago that I had thought he was a negative person; now I wished he was my big brother.

As I walked back to the motel, the town was silent, the highway empty. Thunder ran back and forth across the road. I felt much more confident with the flashlight, and I broke into a jog.

When I reached the motel office, I could see that a television was on somewhere inside. I could hear a humming noise from the fluorescent lights by the vending machines. I bought water, and I sat on the curb for a moment with Thunder, laying my head on my knees and crying. I cried because I was relieved the night was over and also because I knew I had to go back out there tomorrow and run the combine again.

I slipped quietly into our room and took a shower, not just to clean myself, but to wash the pressure out from inside me. Showers had a way of doing that, of washing you inside and out. When I got out of the shower, I just about went to pieces: My left leg itched. I reached down to scratch and felt a mosquito bite. A mosquito bite! It took all of my willpower not to start screaming. I squatted down to peer at the bite and had the strangest thought.

I remembered that it had taken a couple of weeks after the bite that gave me malaria to start feeling sick. So even if this mosquito bite I had now really was from an infected mosquito, which was pretty close to impossible, I’d still have time to work the combine for Jiichan tomorrow and finish up this job with Mick before it was too late. But I didn’t want to think about tomorrow. I opened the bathroom door and climbed in bed next to Jaz, pulling the sheet over my head for a mosquito net.