Susan Patron - The Higher Power of Lucky

“Yeah. She said she hoped there would be butter with the free Government food today so she could make new banana nut bread, because her old banana nut bread was kind of dry. But I told her I like it dry, so she gave me some and it was pretty good.” Miles wiped his grimy hands on his shorts, which were darker on the sides. He took a worn copy of Are You My Mother? and a greasy folded paper towel out of the plastic bag.

“I could trade you this for a cookie,” he said, unfolding the paper towel on the table. Ever since Lucky had told him he was a mooch, he always offered a trade of some kind. Miles had long eyelashes, big round chocolate-chip eyes, and wavy orangey hair. His fingernails were as dark as if he had been changing the oil in a car. He offered the half-eaten piece of banana nut bread. “It’s really good,” he said.

“Okay,” said Lucky, although it wasn’t much of a trade.

Miles said happily, “What kind does Brigitte have? Does she have any mint Milanos? Then will you read me my book?”

Lucky lowered her backpack to the floor and slid out of the banquette. She had read Are You My Mother? to him about a thousand times. “Listen, Miles. I already said what the deal is: I’ll tell you one Olden Days of Hard Pan story, and no noises from you. I’m not reading that book again. Got it?”

“Yeah,” Miles said. “My favorite Olden Days of Hard Pan stories are when Chesterfield the Burro is in them.” He folded his lips inside for a second to show he knew she meant business about making noises. Then he said, “She keeps the cookies in that blue box in the cupboard.”

Miles had done a thorough cookie-availability check with everyone in town at one time or another. He was an expert on who had what kind of cookies, who would give him one, and where they stored them. He made his cookie rounds every day.

Dot’s Baubles ’n’ Beauty Salon was next to Miles’s house, so her back door was his first stop of the day. Usually she’d be in her kitchen, where she had her homemade jewelry for sale and her Beauty Salon, with chairs on the back porch for people to sit in while their curlers got dry. Sometimes Miles let Dot wash his hair as a trade for the cookies. If she had a kind he really loved, like mint Milanos, he let her give him a haircut.

Lucky handed Miles a Fig Newton. He ate it in small bites, gently thumping his heels against the banquette. He rested his bare feet on Lucky’s survival kit backpack under the table.

“Don’t mash my survival kit,” Lucky said.

“I won’t,” he said, and then asked, “What kind of stuff do you have in there?”

“Things you need if you get lost or stuck out in the desert.”

“Like what? A map?”

Lucky hadn’t thought of having a map before. If you were lost it wouldn’t help to have a map, because you didn’t know where you were in the first place. “No, like a good book that you can read to not be bored.”

Miles nodded. “Like Are You My Mother? ” he said. “What other stuff—cookies?”

“Uh-uh. You can’t keep anything like chocolate, because it melts. You really need things like specimen boxes in case you find some good spiders or insects, plus nail polish remover, mineral oil, and stuff for scientific studies.”

“Will Chesterfield the Burro be in the Olden Days of Hard Pan story?”

“Yes,” said Lucky. “It happened when Hard Pan was still a mining town, in the century before last. You have to pretend I lived back then, and I was your age, or maybe six.”

“I’m five and a half.” Miles made a noise like a helicopter.

“No noises, Miles.”

“I forgot. Were there dinosaurs in the Olden Days story?”

“No, this was after the dinosaurs. I was teaching HMS Beagle to heel.” Hearing her name, HMS Beagle thumped her tail on the floor. “She was still a puppy. We went down the dirt road like if you’re going to the old dump”—Lucky gestured to the open desert that began at the edge of their half circle of trailers. Miles looked out the small window toward the purple Coso Mountains hundreds of miles away.

“The Beag wanted to smell everything . I remember there was a whole flock of chukars running in front of us—”

Miles made a chuck-karr chuck-karr chuck-karr noise, exactly like the birds. He kept doing it until Lucky said, “Yeah, those. You can never catch one because as soon as you get close, they fly a little bit away. But HMS Beagle kept trying, because they’re ground birds and can’t fly too far at once. The dirt road got to be a little trail, and then we came to the dugouts.”

“The old miners’ caves? Where I’m not allowed to go?”

“Uh-huh. We thought the caves were a perfect place for our secret home.”

“My grandma says they’re full of black widow spiders.”

“Well, maybe, but we had more important things on our minds. We found this one cave that had an old tin cup and coffee pot and a wooden crate you could sit on, and a little fire pit with a grill. They were still mining silver up the hill and Hard Pan was a boomtown with hundreds of people. One day we went up to the mine and I got a job as a dynamiter because I was small enough to crawl into dangerous holes where no one else could fit. You know the reason they call the town Hard Pan?”

Miles shook his head.

“Because the ground is so hard you can’t get a shovel in it. It’s like cement . You have to use dynamite to dig. Well, I became the top dynamiter up at the mine because I could light the fuse and then get out fast before it blew.

“Our dugout was perfect because there was no rent to pay and people left us alone. We had our own burro named Chesterfield that I rode to my job at the mine, and HMS Beagle got to jump on and ride too.”

Miles broke off tinier and tinier pieces of Fig Newton, as if he could make the story last as long as he still had some cookie left. “Was Chesterfield a boy or a girl burro?”

“Girl. I once saved her life when she was a filly, so she lived with us in the cave and never tried to run away. She had sweet breath from eating tamarisk blossoms and locust tree flowers, and she politely went away from the cave to go to the bathroom.”

Lucky looked up at the arched wooden ceiling of the kitchen trailer and narrowed her eyes, like someone remembering something from long ago. “While I was at work dynamiting for silver in the mine, Chesterfield went to be with the other burros, but she was always waiting for me at five o’clock on the dot when my shift ended.

“But one day a big timber fell on me and I was trapped. I told HMS Beagle, ‘Go get Chesterfield, quick, before this fuse blows me to smithereens!’ and she ran.

“Well, turns out Chesterfield was way, way out in the desert looking for a special yellow-flowered plant she loves. HMS Beagle had to look everywhere. I lay there squished under the timber, and the other miners were saying prayers because they thought I was a goner for sure. Finally I heard Chesterfield galloping up to the mine. The fuse had this far to go”—Lucky held up her little finger—“before it would get to the end and explode.

“HMS Beagle gave one end of a rope to Chesterfield and ran into my hole with the other end. She was still small enough to fit, being a puppy. I held my end tight and Chesterfield pulled with her teeth. She pulled and pulled with all her might. Finally I slid out and the Beag and I jumped on Chesterfield’s back and we made it safely back to the dugouts. After that I quit my job at the mine even though the big boss owner begged me to come back. Then we lived very happily in our dugout for a long time, until we used up everything in the survival kit and decided to come home.”