The Higher Power of Lucky (7 page)

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.

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.

Lucky heard a radio announcer’s smooth radio voice plus Sammy’s growly one as she followed HMS Beagle inside.

“Man, I tried melting it. Wouldn’t melt. Tried grating it. Turns into dough. It must be some kind of secret weapon,” Short Sammy was saying. In the center of the room, at a rough wooden table that had once been a spool for coiling electrical wire, Lincoln leaned over a small bag of Fritos, eating out of it with a spoon. Nearby on the table was a length of cord with knots in it.

“Sammy’s been experimenting with the Government Surplus cheese,” Lincoln explained to Lucky. The radio announcer was telling about traffic tie-ups.

“So far, nobody can figure out what to do with it to make it something you’d want to
eat
,” Sammy said. He pushed back the brim of his cowboy hat and frowned at the cheese. “The chili’s good, though. Made it with U.S. Government Surplus canned pork. Help yourself.”

Quite a lot of people, especially Brigitte, had a strong opinion that Short Sammy used too much grease in his cooking. Brigitte insisted that Lucky should very politely say she wasn’t hungry if he offered her anything to eat.

“Okay, yes, please,” she said. Sammy opened another snack-size bag of Fritos and gave it to Lucky with a tin spoon.

“Pan’s outside. Lid’s hot.”

Lucky lifted the lid with a rag, set it on a rock, and spooned beans and pork into the small bag of Fritos. She replaced the lid.

“…a fender bender,” said the radio announcer, “on the 101 South into downtown L.A. Slow going on the 10 East due to an oil spill in the car-pool lane. Better take the 60 if you can. That three-car pileup on the Pasadena Freeway near the four level has been cleared….”

Short Sammy poured hot water over coffee grounds in a sock filter and shook his head. “That L.A. traffic is terrible,” he said, sounding pleased. The traffic report always cheered him up. “Today’s Saturday, and it’s as bad as Monday rush hour.” He poured dark black coffee into a tin mug.

“So what happened with the snake?” Lincoln asked, digging out the last of his chili-and-Fritos and licking the spoon.

“I scared it away.” Lucky plopped into a chair. “It was a red racer.” Short Sammy’s recipe was a perfect meal because it was extremely delicious, plus no dishes to wash except your spoon and the pan once it was empty.

Short Sammy turned off the radio even though the traffic report wasn’t over. “Red racers are good people, man,” he said. “They get rid of the rattlers and sidewinders.”

“I
know
,” Lucky said. “But Brigitte hates them. This chili is good.”

Sammy waved at flies with his mug. Then he said a strange thing. “Brigitte’s all right. She just needs something to do. She’s bored.”

Lucky’s opinion was that Brigitte’s job of being her Guardian was totally already something to do. How could she be bored with that? Plus, except for Lucky’s own work at the Found Object Wind Chime Museum and Visitor Center, the Captain’s mail-sorting job, and Dot’s Baubles ’n’ Beauty Salon, there were no jobs in Hard Pan no matter how much you wanted one.

“Too bad she can’t open a restaurant or something,” said Lincoln, who loved Brigitte’s French way of making an apple pie. “I bet people would come from Talc Town and all over, plus the caravans of geologists from L.A. and regular tourists.” As Lucky watched, he picked up his cord from the table, then pulled the two ends apart and a whole row of knots came magically undone. Right away he started tying new ones.

Lucky imagined a restaurant where the menu had things like tongue and sweetbreads, which are really some kind of
glands
, and oysters and snails and rabbits—things she was pretty sure French people sat around eating morning, noon, and night. She doubted there would be any customers for a restaurant like that in Hard Pan.

Short Sammy squatted by HMS Beagle, scratching her behind the ears. HMS Beagle loved Short Sammy’s house because the rock floor was very cool to lie on, and because Short Sammy was her best friend after Lucky, ever since he pulled fifteen cactus spines out of her muzzle with his pliers when she was a puppy. “I wonder what they make that cheese
out
of,” Sammy said.

Suddenly Lucky got a picture in her mind of the magazines Brigitte’s mother sent from France, with pictures of beautiful castles and houses. “Sammy,” she said, “have you ever been to France?”

“Sure,” said Short Sammy, “but that was a lifetime ago.”

Lucky knew he meant before he hit rock bottom, back when he still drank rum and homemade wine.

“There’s a very famous museum in France,” Lincoln said.

“Yeah, the Louvre. I remember a café near there,” said Short Sammy.

“So would you rather live in France or Hard Pan?”

Short Sammy gave HMS Beagle a final scratch on her belly and squinted up at Lucky from under the brim of his cowboy hat. He stood, knees popping like when you pop your knuckles, and pivoted on the heel of his pointy-toed boot. “Look, man,” he said, and went to a window, which was a large square cut out of the tin wall at exactly the right level to make a frame for Lucky’s face. Short Sammy and Lucky were the same height, except the boots and hat gave him some extra. “Look at that,” he said.

Lucky looked out at the jumble of trailers, sheds, outhouses, shacks, and rusty vehicles below. Dot was in her backyard hanging small white towels on a clothesline. At the edge of town Lucky’s canned-ham bedroom trailer curled in a half circle with the other trailers it was connected to. “What?” she said, looking for the thing Short Sammy wanted her to see.

Lincoln came to the open doorway to look out in the same direction.

“Just Hard Pan,” Short Sammy said. “HP, pop. 43. And everything that
isn’t
Hard Pan. Look.” Lucky did.

Past the town the desert rolled out and out like a pale green ocean, as far as you could see, to the Coso foothills, then behind them, the huge black Coso Range like the broken edge of a giant cup that held tiny Hard Pan at its bottom. The sky arched up forever, nothing but a sheet of blue, hiding zillions of stars and planets and galaxies that were up there all the time, even when you couldn’t see them. It was kind of peaceful and so gigantic it made your brain feel rested. It made you feel like you could become anything you wanted, like you were filled up with nothing but hope.

HP, she was thinking. HP stood for Hard Pan, but, she realized, it could also stand for Higher Power. Maybe Hard Pan was Short Sammy’s Higher Power because of its slowness and peacefulness and sweet-smellingness, even though it was old and junky and out in the middle of nowhere. Lucky wondered if she could ever get Brigitte to love Hard Pan as much as she loved France.