Susan Patron - The Higher Power of Lucky

The phone rang again. Lucky glared at it. She was way too busy for a zillion phone calls. This time it was Lincoln. She put one hand on her silk hip.

“Everyone’s looking for Miles,” he said.

“He’s probably at Dot’s or at the Found Object Wind Chime Museum and Visitor Center.”

“You think—whoa!—our power just went out. Is yours on?”

“Yeah. Listen, I have to go.”

“If you see Miles, tell him his grandma wants him.”

Lucky held the receiver and felt Lincoln waiting at the other end. She realized she was probably talking to him for the last time, unless they allowed the orphans in the L.A. orphanage to make phone calls, which she doubted. Everyone was so worried about Miles , when it was she who would soon be gone forever.

“Lincoln,” she said, and struggled around in her mind to figure out what she wanted to say. “You are…the best knot artist I ever met.”

Lincoln was silent, either because he was too infected with shyness or because it was another Sign and he was guessing the truth. Very gently and sadly, she hung up.

17. Hms Beagle Disobeys

A part of her mind was telling Lucky that if she ran away she would lose her job at the Found Object Wind Chime Museum and Visitor Center. That certain brain compartment also worried about getting in deep trouble and being sent away.

But a bossier, louder crevice of Lucky’s brain argued that she had already decided about running away. There were already all of her plans and all the supplies , and all the hard work of running away. All that would be wasted if she gave up now.

Then another part of Lucky’s brain reminded her that there was the new problem of Miles. She should be helping to find him. It was her fault that he was missing, even though, she reasoned, she’d had to get rid of him in order to run away herself. But this particular Running-Away was her Running-Away. If Miles had also run away, instead of just, for instance, hiding out under Dot’s back porch, it would be like sharing it, and Lucky did not want to share it. If there was glory, she wanted all the glory. And if there were problems, well, they were his mother’s problems, the price she paid for being in jail.

Lucky put her dust mask on to make herself quit thinking and just go . She snatched up Miles’s book and crammed it into the plastic sack with her rolled-up towel. Then she got her arms into her backpack straps, jumping to center it on her back. It weighed eight hundred pounds.

She soaked a dishtowel and draped it over her head, using Brigitte’s sweatband to anchor it on top and safety-pinning it together under her chin. She looped the plastic sack over her wrist. Lucky and HMS Beagle ran down the trailer steps.

It was way, way noisier outside. The canvas awning strained and flapped as the wind roared; the trailers creaked and rocked on their blocks. The wind blew toward the open desert, which was where Lucky was heading, so at least she had it at her back.

With HMS Beagle trotting ahead, they crossed the invisible boundary of the edge of Hard Pan into the Bureau of Land Management land, leaving the town and walking onto the vast Mojave Desert. Lucky felt that it was good she was so well prepared—otherwise, she’d have been a tiny bit scared.

They struggled down the sandy road that led across the desert to some abandoned mines in the distant hills. Lucky knew it was important to stay on the rutted road to keep from getting lost. She kept a tight grip on her plastic sack, which twisted and strained to fly away. Her dishtowel flapped and made it hard to see, but was cool and kept some of the swirling sand out of her hair. Uprooted plants and old junk whipped past.

After about twenty minutes Lucky needed to pee. She went off to the side, watching for snakes and scorpions and nasty types of cactus, and squatted, pulling her underpants down and the silk dress up to her waist. She planted one shoe on the handles of the plastic sack to keep it from flapping away.

It was hard keeping her balance with the backpack on, but she didn’t want to take the thing off and then have to put it on again with no chair or counter to back up to. She realized that the toilet paper was wrapped up in the towel inside the sack, and undoing everything to get it would be impossible. Right now for peeing it was okay—you just stayed squatting and the wind dried everything in a quick minute. But later on Lucky would need to organize her stuff better, with the toilet paper on top.

As she lurched to her feet and pulled her underpants up at the same time, the whole weight of the backpack seemed to shift and she lost her balance and fell backward. Stuff in her backpack crunched and something mashed into her spine. It made her feel discouraged, like if you took the word apart into two sections of dis and couraged . It was getting harder and harder to stay couraged.

She rolled over onto her hands and knees and stayed that way for a while, panting into her mask. Hard little rocks pressed against her knees through the silk and nipped her palms. Not a soul in the world knew where she was, or cared. She was nothing but a speck on the surface of the Earth. Lucky almost didn’t have the strength to stand up again, but then HMS Beagle went bounding away down the road.

Even my dog abandons me, thought Lucky, but she heaved herself up, clutching the plastic bag, and plowed on.

Lucky stole her technique of keeping going from the anonymous twelve-step people, whose slogan is “One Day at a Time.” If you think of undoing a big habit day after day for the entire rest of your life, you can’t bear it because it’s too overwhelming and hard, so you give up. But if you think only of getting through this one day, and don’t worry about later, you can do it. Lucky used the “One Day at a Time” idea by putting one foot in front of the other without thinking about what would happen later. She knew she could do one step and then another step and then another step and then another step as long as she thought “One Step at a Time.”

But the wind was a terribly strong enemy. Sometimes it pushed her so hard from behind that she thought it would knock her over. Once a huge thing that turned out to be most of a washing machine hurtled past her, and she saw a sheet and pillowcase—probably ripped by the wind from someone’s clothesline—sailing out to the desert.

When HMS Beagle suddenly veered across the path to sniff at a pile of old rags, Lucky did not pause. She pressed on, believing the dugouts must be close now, though she couldn’t see very far in any direction. The dugouts would give shelter from the wind. After a while, she looked back through the blast of dust. HMS Beagle was sitting by the rags.

“HMS Beagle, come!” she said, but her words were whooshed away by the wind. Lucky gestured with her whole arm for the dog to come. HMS Beagle sat.

Lucky grimly turned away and went on. Of course HMS Beagle was going to leave her all by herself! What worse thing could happen?

When the road curved around a low hill, Lucky suddenly couldn’t get her bearings. Was this some fork she’d forgotten about? She didn’t remember the road curving like that, which made her heart pump out waves of panic. The project was to run away, not to get lost . She looked behind her: nothing but the thick blanket of brown dust. But the hill on her right provided a buffer, so instead of turning back she pulled the dishcloth away from her face so she could peer around.