Susan Patron - The Higher Power of Lucky

Halfway up the hill was a level shelf, and behind the shelf—the dugouts! Five uneven door-size holes leading to shallow caves in the hill. She’d gone much farther than she’d realized. Seeing the dugouts made Lucky feel almost like she’d come home.

Lucky staggered up to the first dugout, a cave about the size of her canned-ham trailer. In that protected spot, the roar and powerful force of the wind let go its grip, and Lucky shrugged off her backpack at last. At the cave entrance, she unrolled the towel and laid it out like a picnic blanket, weighting the corners with stones.

It was an excellent choice that she was wearing a beautiful silk French dress as her running-away outfit, although it was now covered with grit and dust. She arranged herself on the towel in a beauty-queen way. If Lincoln had been there, she would have asked him to teach her how to make a knot so strong it would never come undone.

Lucky rerolled the stuff from the towel into her jacket. She stripped off her mask and took a big swig of Gatorade. The dishcloth was completely dry now, and when she shook it out, she found her hair and ears, the corners of her eyes, her eyelashes and eyebrows were all full of sand.

She began to worry about HMS Beagle.

“HMS Beagle!” she shouted. “Beag!” She pictured her dog meeting a sidewinder on the road. Or maybe she got conked by a flying lawn chair. What if HMS Beagle was in trouble? Why else wouldn’t she have finally caught up?

Lucky was bone weary and couldn’t bear the thought of going back into the windstorm, but she was also lonely and worried, and the worried part was strongest. Leaving the backpack, leaving the plastic bag, Lucky ran down the road to find her dog.

Heading into the wind turned out to be way, way harder, even without her backpack and supply sack. Lucky had to scuttle along doubled over, like an old woman, keeping her squinted eyes on the road. Without the mask or the dishcloth her face was completely exposed. She couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead.

She almost tripped over HMS Beagle, who trotted up to her with her head low to the ground, her ears whipping forward. She touched Lucky with her nose and then abruptly turned and bounded back toward the town. Maybe HMS Beagle was right and they should go home. Lucky stopped.

“Hey, Beag!” she yelled. Then, faintly, she heard a cat or some other animal crying, and saw that HMS Beagle was nudging that pile of rags.

Very carefully Lucky approached the thing, which was huddled in a tight ball. It looked like the thing was rolled up in an old tablecloth or sheet. Sticking out of the roll was a small sneaker with a toe poking through a hole in the side.

18. Cholla Burr

Miles, she thought. Oh, la vache. She wanted nothing to do with him. She longed to turn around and go back to the dugout. Miles was way much too much trouble and he was ruining everything. He hadn’t seen her, because he’d completely rolled himself up in the tablecloth, one he must have snagged as it flew by, so he’d never know she’d been there and neither would anyone else. She turned to go and the wind helped her, pushing her back to the shelter of the dugout. But when she was almost there she knew HMS Beagle was right. That dog would never have to do a searching and fearless moral inventory of her self. Lucky sighed and fought her way through the wind back to Miles.

He pressed his face, streaked with tears, snot, and dirt, into Lucky’s front and gripped his arms around her neck. “I was waiting for Chesterfield to find me,” he sobbed, “but a coyote came and snuffled me.”

“That was only HMS Beagle,” Lucky said. “The dugouts aren’t far—let’s go, quick.”

“I can’t. I have a cactus in my foot. It hurts!” Miles started crying again.

It was a cholla burr the size of a golf ball, a dozen of its needles stuck deep into Miles’s heel. Lucky didn’t touch it. She knew very well from the time she had stepped on one that you could not pull it out with your fingers. Plus she knew that it burned like fire underneath your skin.

“Where’s your shoe?” she said into his ear. He hadn’t loosened his grip on her neck.

“I don’t know! I lost it.”

“Okay, look. I’m going to carry you piggyback. You have to help by letting go and then climbing on me.”

“Please don’t trick me and leave me here, Lucky!”

“I promise I won’t, Miles. Come on.”

Even though she’d had a lot of practice lugging her survival kit backpack all the time, Lucky was surprised at how heavy a five-year-old boy could feel. She staggered back up the hill to the dugout, feeling as if the day had been going on for weeks.

Her worst thought was that she didn’t have pliers to grip the cholla burr and pull it out. Even if she made a very clumsy glove by folding the dishcloth over and over on itself, the cholla’s steel-hard needles would plunge right through the cloth and get stuck in her hand.

Miles sat on the towel with his bare foot propped on his other leg to keep anything from touching the burr and making it hurt worse. He gulped Gatorade, finishing the bottle. HMS Beagle spent a long time lapping water.

“I already tried to get it out,” he said, “but it hurts your fingers to touch it.”

“I know,” Lucky said. She rummaged through her supplies and survival kit. She’d seen Short Sammy dislodge a burr stuck in a boot by slipping a fork between the needles and the leather and f lipping it out, instead of trying to pull it out.

But Lucky didn’t have a fork or even a comb, which also might have worked. She needed something toothed . But the toothbrush bristles were way too soft.

“Lucky?”

“Miles, I’m concentrating. What.”

“Nothing.”

Lucky sighed. “Okay, what?” she said in a nicer, paying-attention way.

“You don’t look normal. You look kind of…fancy.”

Lucky scowled.

“But you look pretty and kind of…grown up,” he added.

Lucky thought of herself as someone highly adapted to her habitat, being all one colorless color, rather than pretty. She narrowed her eyes at Miles to see if he was up to something, but he was looking worriedly at the cholla burr, with its needle-sharp thorns sticking out in every direction—a dozen of them in his heel. She tucked the thought of prettiness into a safe crevice, for thinking about later.

Suddenly Miles said, “Is Brigitte coming to make our dinner?”

“No, Miles. We ran away .”

“ I didn’t run away.”

Lucky let that go.

“Then why is her thing for parsley here?” Miles asked.

“Just a keepsake, like when you want to remember someone and—” Lucky broke off. Her mind had found a great spectacular idea. She plucked Brigitte’s gadget from the pile of supplies and released its little latch. The two parts separated—a funnel-like part where you crammed in the parsley and a little spoked part with a handle.

She gripped the top of Miles’s foot in one hand. “Don’t move,” she said. Very carefully she angled the tin spokes under the cholla and with a hard, sure, sudden twist, she flipped the whole burr away.

“Ow,” Miles cried.