Susan Patron - The Higher Power of Lucky

But she doubted that Brigitte knew enough about snakes to tell whether it was a rattlesnake or some harmless kind.

Lucky said, “Brigitte, what does it look like? What color?”

Brigitte shrugged and looked insulted, as if the question had a completely obvious answer. She said, “She is the color of a snake.”

Lucky sighed. “What shape is its head?”

A lot of times when Brigitte didn’t know the answer to something, either she acted like it was a dumb question, or she pretended to know the answer, or else she veered around with an answer that wasn’t really an answer at all. “Lucky, we will look at the shape of her head after she has died—when it is safe.”

“You mean when it dies of old age?” Lucky couldn’t believe how weird that plan was. “That could probably take years . We’ll have to hang up the wet laundry outside and the towels won’t have California softness.”

“Lucky,” said Brigitte, crossing her arms in front of her chest. “Please go get that gray sticky tape right now.”

“Wait—yikes. I left Lincoln on the phone. Be right back.”

Lucky picked up the phone. “There’s a snake in the dryer,” she said.

“Miles’s grandmother had one in her dryer once. It came in through the vent going to the outside of the mobile home.”

“What did she do?”

“Thirty minutes on ‘normal cycle.’”

“You’re kidding!”

There was a little silence on Lincoln’s end. “No,” he said. “That’s what she did. Her dryer doesn’t have a see-through door. Does yours?”

“No, it’s just pure metal. So what?”

“She couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a rattler, so she killed it.”

“Brigitte wants to duct-tape the dryer door shut and wait till the snake dies of old age. After that she’ll probably want to duct-tape the whole entire outside of the trailers.”

Lincoln said, “We could catch a mouse and use it as bait to lure the snake out.”

All of Lincoln’s plans were both simple and complicated. They were tempting, but at the same time they made you feel doubtful before you even got started. But Lucky now had her own idea. “I’ll meet you at Short Sammy’s in about half an hour,” she said, and hung up. She went back to the laundry area with the duct tape and a pair of scissors and gave them to Brigitte.

Brigitte stuck the end of the duct tape on one edge of the dryer, pressing it hard, peeling off more tape and pressing it against the metal, until she had the door very securely fixed. No creature inside the dryer could get out through that door.

Lucky climbed up on top of the dryer, where she could peer out a tiny window.

“What are you doing, Lucky?” Brigitte asked. She was wearing a don’t-you-dare-touch-the-duct-

tape-on-the-dryer-door look.

“Wait a sec,” said Lucky. Still peering out the window, she stomped the heel of her shoe on the dryer. She braced herself against the wall and banged her shoe on the front and the sides of the dryer. Brigitte watched, but one of the good things about her was that she didn’t act like she was the total boss of everything. Especially when it came to the way things worked in Hard Pan versus the way things worked in France, Brigitte was willing to listen to what Lucky had to say.

Pretty soon, through the dusty window, Lucky could see the snake gliding away from the trailer. “It’s gone!” she said. She jumped down and dashed outside in time to see its long, thin, reddish, legless, rattle-less body disappear in the dry wash. It was a beauty—about five feet long, thin as a hose. Lucky thought it was a red racer, the kind of snake that eats rats and even fights rattlesnakes.

Lucky felt very wonderful about her Heroic Deed of figuring out how to chase the snake away without killing it in a gruesome way or waiting for it to die of old age. Plus, if it had been a rattlesnake, nobody got bitten. She went inside, thinking she had to figure out some kind of screen to put on the vent to keep the snake from coming back. At that moment Lucky knew she was a highly evolved human being.

But Brigitte was at the bathroom cupboard, rummaging through the aspirin and Q-tips and hair conditioner. “Now I cannot find the fingernail polish remover! It is the only way to get off that sticky mess of duct tape!” she said. “It is wrong to have snakes in dryers! This is not something that would ever happen in France. California is not a civilized country!”

Lucky didn’t say a word. It was too hopeless and disappointing. Brigitte hated bugs and she hated snakes and she thought California was a country . Plus the checks from her father were too small.

The sad and beautiful French songs played on and on, the sound drifting out the window and into the dry desert air. Lucky didn’t know what the words meant, but she understood that Hard Pan was pushing Brigitte away, and France was calling her home.

9. Short Sammy’s

You could smell Short Sammy’s water tank house before you got there, because whatever he cooked in his big black cast-iron pan, he cooked in grease. Beans, pancakes, lettuce, apples—always cooked in grease, bacon grease being his most favorite. The smell of the water tank house activated Lucky’s hunger gland.

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.