Lucky Breaks (4 page)

Uncle Rocky and the geologists had promised to stop by for coffee and brownies the next day, Sunday afternoon, before the long drive back to the San Fernando Valley. Early that morning Paloma called Lucky from the hotel in Sierra City.

“So how did they like their gift?” Paloma said.

Lucky thought she’d missed something in the conversation. “Who?”

“The chickens!”

Lucky laughed and said in her fake British-queen accent, “Oh, superb, you know, especially with the garlic and butter sauce.” In her regular voice she added, “I wish you could come back next weekend.”

“Me too. I wish Hard Pan wasn’t so far. It’s like two hundred miles.”

“Yeah, but the geologists love it here. Maybe your uncle will come back and bring you.”

“We need a plan,” said Paloma. “Let’s each try to think of one and compare notes when I get there.”

When the minivan stuffed with geologists and Paloma arrived that afternoon, Lucky was still working hard on a plan for the next weekend. It would be one of the last with balmy, warm nights, and Brigitte had talked about a little celebration for Lucky’s birthday.

Through her porthole window, Lucky watched everyone climb out of the minivan. Pete and Uncle Rocky set up a laptop at one of the Café tables and hunched over it, talking excitedly and peering together at the screen. The seismologist, sedimentologist, and mineralogist stood around stretching and drinking from their water bottles.

Carrying a tray outside, Lucky scrunched up one side of her mouth as a way of showing Paloma that she didn’t have an actual plan yet but was working on it. Paloma nodded at the brownies as an answer that at least everyone would be in a good brownie-eating mood. They could tell what each other was thinking, as if their brains had a wireless connection.

“Check out these rock layers—beautiful data from right up on the hill,” Pete said to Brigitte, showing her the photograph on his laptop screen. “We’re going to look further next weekend, on our own time, just for fun, if Rocky can get away. We figure if we leave L.A. on Friday afternoon, we’ll have two good days to poke around and, most important, two Hard Pan Café meals.” Lucky and Paloma stared at each other with wide
eyes and flopped into chairs. Lucky eyebrowed Paloma as code for
This is going smoothly without our even having made a plan yet!

Brigitte peered at the screen. “These layers of rocks are making me think of a
croque-monsieur
,” she said, meaning a sandwich with layers of ham and cheese. “Maybe I will make them for lunch next Saturday or Sunday.”

Pete’s eyes opened wide and his eyebrows jumped up. “Then I’ll be coming for sure, even if Rocky can’t,” he said. Lucky’s anxiety glands contracted. What if Paloma’s uncle Rocky couldn’t get away?

“If they come, can Paloma come too and sleep over?” Lucky asked, aiming her question at Brigitte but hoping Paloma’s uncle would understand she was also asking him. “She’s already famous in Hard Pan—there’s an old legend about a beautiful woman named Paloma, and a piece of jewelry in the Found Object Wind Chime Museum and Visitor Center that Paloma has to come back and see because it was a gift to her namesake.” Lucky had told Paloma the legend with all its gory details, but she didn’t go into those now. She didn’t want to alarm Uncle Rocky or have him talk about murder to Paloma’s parents.

“Please?” Paloma added. “It would be really educational and cultural, going to the museum.”

Rocky shrugged and smiled at his niece. “It’s okay with me if your folks don’t mind. But your mother is a little concerned about supervision.” To Brigitte, Uncle Rocky explained, “Paloma’s mom thinks it’s the Wild West out here and got worked up about snakes and scorpions and sunstroke and who knows what-all.
Dehydration. Paloma getting lost in the desert. Hantavirus. Wild burros. You name it.” He shook his head to show that
he
didn’t agree that all those bad things would happen. “She still thinks of me as her little kid brother who doesn’t take things seriously. I had to promise not to let Paloma out of my sight—don’t know if my sister will agree to a sleepover.”

“Well, it is not really so wild in Hard Pan,” said Brigitte. Lucky had noticed that Brigitte’s back always got a little bit straighter when people said anything critical about Hard Pan. “Lucky and I are very happy to have Paloma as our guest. I call her mother to make the invitation if you give me her telephone number. I will explain that there was only that one time that I find the snake in the clothes dryer.”

All the geologists laughed, but Lucky did not find this funny. “Brigitte, please leave out the part about the snake,” she said. To Rocky she added, “It was only a red racer. And I promise we won’t get lost in the desert like I almost did the time I was trying to run away, and we’ll wear lots of sunscreen and”—Lucky searched for more ways to reassure Uncle Rocky about Paloma’s safety—“and you can tell Paloma’s mom that all the tarantulas are finished crossing the road by now because I haven’t seen any in about a week.”

“Oh, well, then,” Uncle Rocky said in a serious voice that meant, Lucky knew, that he was teasing her. “Sounds like that about covers all the possible dangers.” Lucky understood that Paloma’s uncle’s teasing wasn’t
mean
teasing, but she wished he understood how very, very serious the subject was,
about Paloma coming back next weekend. Rocky must have read the look on Lucky’s face, because he said, “Don’t worry; I’ll do my best.” Paloma jumped up and went behind Rocky’s seat to hug him from behind, then did a little dance over to Brigitte and hugged her in a quick, shy way. Lucky saw Uncle Rocky jam his cap on his head to hide his ears, which had become red exactly as Lincoln’s did when he was embarrassed, and Lucky exchanged a secret triumphant look with Paloma.

Sometimes certain things are so important, so vital and urgent, that they get a momentum of their own, like a force of nature. Lucky felt sure that the essentialness of Paloma coming back to Hard Pan was exactly that kind of force of nature, and one way or another, it would happen.

On Monday morning, as Lucky and HMS Beagle waited with Miles and Lincoln for the school bus, a noisy white pickup crested the hill and cruised down into Hard Pan, braking at the

SLOW:
CHILDREN
AT
PLAY

sign. Most everyone, people and dogs, when they heard a vehicle arriving, would turn to see who it was and where it was going. HMS Beagle knew certain vehicles by sound, and by watching her dog, Lucky got a heads-up on whether or not something exciting or interesting might be about to happen.

They saw two men in the pickup’s cab and a huge rectangular wooden crate in the bed. None of them knew the vehicle, and they hoped it would get to its destination before
the bus arrived so they’d have a chance to figure out what was going on. HMS Beagle stood fully alert, ears forward, black nose twitching.

When it pulled up near Short Sammy’s water tank house, Lucky was sure that each and every Hard Panner’s curiosity glands were pumping overtime. Short Sammy didn’t get too many visitors from out of town, and it would be interesting to know, if that big wooden box was being delivered to him, what was in it. He didn’t have a lot of stuff, and he didn’t
want
a lot of stuff. There was his guitar, his radio for listening to the traffic reports from Los Angeles, and his big black cast-iron frying pan. Short Sammy’s only other great treasure had been his dog, Roy.

Lucky knew, from the way Short Sammy sometimes glanced at the photo of his dog in its sardine-can frame, that he missed Roy; he missed him a lot.

The dog had survived a bite on his scrotum by a rattlesnake in the days before Short Sammy quit drinking. Sammy’s wife had left him right after that incident, and she had taken Roy with her. But whatever the pickup truck was bringing, it surely wasn’t the one thing Short Sammy wanted—Roy.

Lucky noticed the Captain peering out from his observation tower, a three-foot-square glass-sided enclosure that stuck up from his roof like a see-through chimney. The Captain liked to keep tabs on goings-on around town. Dot and Mrs. Prender had come out of their houses, both apparently finding that they had important things to take care of outdoors, and they (like Lucky, Miles, Lincoln, and HMS Beagle) watched the
truck as it slowed at the post with Short Sammy’s address on it.

Nine dented and rusty enamel tea-kettles were bolted to the post, which made it interesting and noticeable. Short Sammy had painted

230 Dry Gulch Street

in red letters that began at the top and went down. No one else bothered with posts or street signs or addresses, because it was just as easy to give your visitor directions like, “Turn left at the ‘Slow: Children at Play’ sign” or “Go just past the cabin with four washing machines in the front yard,” and all the mail came to P.O. boxes at the post office. But Short Sammy said he liked having an actual address and wanted it to be visible on his teakettle post.

The driver pulled up and parked beside Sammy’s house, and all the Hard Panners who were busy with weeding and raking and rug shaking, plus the Captain in his observation tower and those waiting for the school bus, watched. The driver and the passenger, who wore T-shirts, jeans, and baseball caps, stood talking with Sammy a moment, and then they all grouped around the truck bed, leaning on their elbows to look in.

“They’re figuring out how to move the box,” Lincoln said. “Bet it’s heavy.”

Sammy gestured and pointed, and the driver jerked down the tailgate, which made a loud rusty shriek. The three men lifted
out a flat wheeled cart and set it on the ground. Then they carefully angled and slid out the very large and heavy wooden box, positioned it on the cart, and rolled it to a spot at the side of Sammy’s front door. They heaved it off the cart and onto the ground.

After the truck left, instead of sitting outside on a lawn chair in the shade, where neighbors could stroll by and comment about the box in order to get him to tell them what was in it, Short Sammy went inside and pulled his door shut. Everyone knew this meant that he didn’t want visitors.

“What’s in Short Sammy’s box?” Miles asked.

Lucky thought about it. “No idea,” she said.

“I don’t like it,” Lincoln said. “It’s exactly the size and shape of a—” He stopped.

“Of a what?” Miles asked.

Lincoln looked at Miles and frowned. He said, “I think the bus is coming,” and as Miles turned to look, Lincoln gave Lucky a silent message, a tiny, quick shake of the head while flicking his eyes toward Miles. Lucky understood: He didn’t want to say whatever it was in Miles’s hearing. She nodded, agreeing not to discuss it then.

Miles was the first to board, greeting Sandi the bus driver enthusiastically. “Short Sammy got a big box delivered to him just now,” he told her.

“Back of the bus,” Sandi said, as she always did, checking her side-view mirror.

A moment later Lincoln boarded and walked backward
slowly down the long aisle to the very end of the bus, talking to Lucky in a low voice. “I hate to even say it. It’s very sad,” he said.

Lucky hadn’t found anything sad about the big wooden box. “Why sad?” she asked.

“Lucky, when you look at the size and shape of that box and how heavy it was, there’s only one thing it can be!”

“Well, what?” Lucky said.

Lincoln stopped walking and leaned toward her, whispering. “The only thing it can be is a…No, it doesn’t make sense.”

“Hurry up and take your seats!” Sandi yelled.

“Lincoln! What?”

“No, I’m sure I’m wrong. Let’s forget it. Short Sammy will tell us if he wants us to know.” Lincoln swung into the nearest seat, moving over to the window. Lucky kept walking, touching the seat backs on either side of the aisle for balance. She’d suddenly realized what Lincoln had been thinking. He’d concluded that the box was a casket.

She felt her heart beating as if it were trying to escape from her chest.

Short Sammy was going to die.

Some of the things Brigitte tried and practiced and wished for, in her goal of getting her American citizenship and becoming a “real” Californian, seemed strange to Lucky. But Brigitte’s efforts and struggles made Lucky (and a lot of other people in Hard Pan) realize that, just by being born here, they were experts on California-ness and American-ness. And advising Brigitte could be pretty fun. Her campaign got a lot of momentum when she bought a Weber barbecue at the Sierra City Thrift Store. She’d cleaned it and polished it and listened when Lincoln advised her never to use scavenged wood for making charcoal, because it could have chemicals like anti-termite poison in it. To Brigitte, a Weber in her yard—where everyone could see it—was solid proof of her California-ness.

Brigitte had invited Lincoln, Miles and his grandmother Mrs. Prender, Short Sammy, and Dot for dinner on Monday to celebrate the first meal cooked on her good-as-new Weber.
Everyone, adults and kids, knew not to talk to Sammy about his box. Even Miles, now that he was nearly six, understood about
minding your own business
. At the same time, Lucky worried and worried. She hoped that Sammy would bring up the subject of his box himself and explain that it wasn’t a casket at all.

Dinner was ribs and corn on the cob served on paper plates, with lemonade to drink.

“This is a
very
typical American-Californian dinner,” Lucky said, as a way to make Brigitte consider cooking it often.

Miles showed Brigitte how to roll her corncob directly on the stick of butter, turning and turning until it was glistening and the stick of butter had a little dip of a saddle in the center.

“We do not eat corn in this way in France,” Brigitte said. “While it is still attached to its cob. Are you sure it is polite to put your corn right on the stick of butter?”

“Oh, for sure,” said Lucky, who loved corn on the cob and felt sad for French people not eating it. In a delicate, artistic way, she scraped the kernels off her cob to create a certain pattern, using her front teeth to eat around two somewhat crooked lines of bright yellow corn. When she was done, a wobbly number eleven stood out against the white cob. Then she ate those kernels too, wishing that turning eleven would make it easier to figure out things like mysterious big heavy boxes.

Lucky had not told Brigitte her worries about Sammy’s box being a casket. He acted normal, not like someone who was getting ready to die, but Lucky wasn’t sure. She kept her worries
inside herself, because talking about them, she believed, would make something bad happen.

After dinner they stayed around the Weber, lounging on the old Chevy and Ford truck seats that had been salvaged from the dump. The seats, neatly mended with duct tape so their insides wouldn’t smush out, were grouped by the barbecue in a side area apart from the outdoor tables of the Café.

“Now for the surprise,” said Miles. “A very typical American
dessert
.” The sun had dipped behind the Coso Mountains, and light was beginning to seep out of the sky. But Miles’s face shone as if excitement came in a little tube and it had been rubbed all over him.

“Ice cream?” Brigitte guessed.

“Even more American,” Miles said.

“Brownies?”

“Even
more
American.” Lucky could tell that Miles loved having important information in his brain that wasn’t known by an adult. He had become an authority on typical American food and how to eat it. “And it’s a dessert we’re going to cook on the Weber!”

Brigitte looked intrigued. “Tell me!” she said.

Bouncing on the seat, Miles cried, “S’mores!” He ran to Mrs. Prender’s VW for the ingredients as Lincoln added a few more coals to the barbecue.

Brigitte had never heard of s’mores before, so Miles put himself in charge of teaching her the finer points of making them.

“First, each person has to cook their marshmallow,” he said in a teacherish voice, distributing metal skewers to everyone. “Not until it’s burned, just try to get it melty and brown.” Miles stood at the Weber, demonstrating his technique of turning constantly to achieve even brownness. “But if you get it too cooked, it’s okay, because the inside will still be good. Then you quick smear it onto the cookie part”—carefully he slid the marshmallow onto a graham cracker, dropped the skewer on the ground, and licked his fingers—“and plop the chocolate on”—Lucky handed him a small square of Hershey bar—“while it’s still hot so the marshmallow melts it, and another graham cracker on top. But you have to be very careful or you’ll burn your fingers for sure.” Miles took his eyes off this project (it required quite a lot of concentration in order to keep any of the ingredients from falling off ) to see if Brigitte was paying attention.

“Okay,” she said seriously, poking a marshmallow onto her own skewer, “now I do one.”

Miles blew on his little sandwichy dessert, took a small bite, and said to Brigitte, “Bet you don’t know why they’re called s’mores.”

Brigitte turned her marshmallow carefully. “I think it is named for a certain region of America,” she said, “which is famous for its desserts.”

Lucky laughed. “No,” she said, “it’s—”

“Wait! Don’t tell her!” Miles shouted. “Guess again, Brigitte!
S’mores
!” He pronounced the word exaggeratedly, as a hint.

“It’s named for Captain Smor,” Lincoln said, “who was known for fighting duels with barbecue skewers.”

Miles glared at Lincoln, saw that he was teasing, and rapped his skewer against the Weber. “Lincoln, be serious. I’m
trying
to help Brigitte get more American! She really needs to know stuff like about s’mores.”

“Okay,” Lincoln said. “You’re right. Go ahead and tell her the real truth.”

Miles shouted, “Because you always want s’more!”

Brigitte frowned. She didn’t get it. This, to Lucky, was a perfect example of why it was so hard for Brigitte to learn how to become more American. It was because of the way that Brigitte thought like a French person, in a logical, orderly way. In Lucky’s opinion, when it came to something like s’mores, you had to be able to think in a way that was a little bit silly.

Miles explained, “Because you want
some more
. S’more! Now do you get it?”

“Ah!” Brigitte said, and she laughed, her eyes reflecting the light from the Weber’s low flames. “Of course, now I do,” she said. “You are right to teach me this amusing name, Miles, and I am glad to have such a clever teacher for becoming more American.”

“They tested him out at the school,” Mrs. Prender shouted. “Said his IQ is genius level.” Lucky wasn’t surprised. Miles had told her about the testing, which he’d actually enjoyed. Now that Miles knew how to read, he suddenly seemed to be able to read
anything. He loved the Henry and Mudge series, but he also read much harder books. His recent favorite was a book called
Brain Surgery for Beginners
.

“
Plus
, I’m turning six next Sunday,” Miles said, as if being a genius and having a birthday at the same time were a special, lifetime achievement. “And the day after that is Lucky’s birthday, and she’ll be eleven. I wish we could have a big party.”

Lucky smiled. She knew that Brigitte had already started making plans for a combined party.

“Big, like how big?” Lincoln said.

Lucky shrugged. “Oh, all of us plus your parents,” she said.

“No,” Miles said. “It should be everyone! A great big enormous party! We should invite the whole entire town of Hard Pan!”