Lucky Strike

by Bobbie Pyron

  She’d argued with her science teacher the other day about whether or not Einstein’s theory of relativity opened the possibility for time travel. Her teacher said it was the stuff of bad science fiction novels. Gen had quoted Einstein as saying, “The separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion.” Her teacher had suggested (rather sarcastically, now that she thought about it) that if she knew so much, maybe she should build a time machine for next year’s science project and take a trip.

  Gen sighed. If she could build a time machine, the first thing she’d do is go back to Nate’s birthday — before Goofy Golf, before the lightning had struck the golf club, when everything was the way it had always been. Because what would a turtle be without its shell?

  Nate stood beside Ricky, Connor, and Buddy, gazing at the two-foot-tall glass jar full of jelly beans on the counter at Jean’s Drugstore. A sign taped to the jar read GUESS THE EXACT NUMBER OF JELLY BEANS AND WIN FREE ICE CREAM FLOATS FOR A MONTH!

  “Wow, ice cream floats for a month,” Ricky said. “I could eat five a day.”

  “Shoot, that’s nothing,” Buddy said. “I bet I could eat ten a day.”

  Nate sighed. Ice cream floats reminded him of hot summer afternoons eating Mrs. Beam’s ice cream floats on the Beam family’s back porch, which reminded Nate of Gen. And that reminded him with a sick feeling in his belly of the words he’d said to her two days before.

  “How many thousands of jelly beans do you think could be in there?” Connor said, squinting at one side of the jar, then the other.

  Buddy rubbed his hands together like a greedy squirrel. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. He gave Nate a poke. “We’ve got our secret weapon here. Whatever he guesses will win us the floats, right, Sparky?”

  He shrugged uneasily. “I’m not sure how that would work.”

  “Isn’t that like cheating?” Ricky Sands pointed out.

  Buddy grabbed Nate’s wrist and shoved his hand against the jar. “No it’s not. Tell us what it says.”

  “I don’t know.” Nate tried his best to squirm his way out of Buddy’s grip.

  Jean Robbs, owner of the drugstore, appeared behind the counter and glared down at the boys. She pointed at Nate and said, “His guess doesn’t count.” And then she narrowed her eyes and said, “And any guess you boys give doesn’t count either.”

  “That’s not fair!” Connor protested.

  Jean Robbs planted her fists on her hips and said, “Like your friend there said, it’d be cheating. Now get on out of my drugstore.”

  The boys slunk out into the afternoon heat.

  “Nuts,” Buddy said.

  “I told you,” Ricky said.

  “Shut up, Ricky,” Connor said. Then he pointed at Nate. “You ruined it.”

  This set the boys to arguing like nobody’s business. Ricky said he always knew it was cheating, and Buddy said since when did Ricky become such a goody-two-shoes, and Connor said if Buddy hadn’t been so loud in the drugstore, the owner would have never suspected what they were doing anyway.

  “Cheater!”

  “Goody-two-shoes!”

  “Loudmouth!”

  The boys shouted at one another as they stalked off in three different directions, leaving Nate all by himself on the hot sidewalk.

  “Jeez Louise,” he muttered.

  As he started toward the docks to see if he could find his grandpa, two little girls dressed in identical pink shorts and purple shirts came toward him. He smiled and waved. “Hey, Ruth. Hey, Rebecca.” He hadn’t realized until he saw them coming up the street how much he missed the Beam family.

  The two girls raced up to him. But instead of their usual squealing and jumping and climbing, they stopped in front of Nate, glared their hardest, meanest glares, reared back, and kicked him in the shins.

  Nate doubled over in pain. “Ow! Ow! What the heck was that for?”

  “You made our sister cry, that’s what,” Ruth spat.

  “Yeah,” Rebecca said. “You’re just like all the other mean kids,” and she gave Nate another swift kick in the shin for good measure before they stalked off, arm in arm, into the drugstore.

  He sat down on the curb, rubbing his shins. He didn’t know which hurt worse, though, his shins or the fact that he’d made Gen cry. Surely Rebecca and Ruth were wrong. In all the years he’d known Genesis Beam, he’d never, ever seen her cry. No matter what the mean kids at school called her or what they said about her, she acted like it didn’t bother her at all. Heck, he always figured Gen had a tough shell, just like the loggerhead turtles she cared so much about.

  Two rain-soaked nights later, Grandpa and Nate sat slumped in their little silver trailer staring at their broken television.

  “I reckon the shrimpers and the charter boat crews are coming in about now,” Grandpa said with a sigh. “They’ll be washing down their boat decks and heading on over to the Laughing Gull Grill, hashing over the latest scuttlebutt.”

  Nate turned and asked, “Why aren’t you going over to the Laughing Gull?”

  “They think I’m somehow cheating, getting all the good charter trips. And of course, winning that truck didn’t help,” he said.

  “Because of me,” Nate said.

  Grandpa gave him a little shake. “No, son, just funny notions people get in their heads. And just between you and me, I’m not sure how much I like that new truck, anyway,” Grandpa confessed. “I feel guilty every time I put a bait bucket or my old crab traps in the back and get into the front in dirty clothes. It’s almost like the truck takes it personally. Does that sound crazy?” Grandpa asked.

  “No sir, not to me,” Nate said.

  “Why aren’t you out with those new friends of yours?” Grandpa asked.

  Nate rubbed his thumb over the letter L burned into the palm of his hand. “They all just fight over me now. They think I can bring them good luck and that I have some kind of Midas touch. They don’t really care about me,” he said.

  Grandpa put his arm around Nate’s shoulder and drew him close. “Like I said, folks get funny notions in their heads.” He took Nate’s scarred hand and stared into the palm. Lightly he traced his finger over the L and the Y. “Do you think something did happen?”

  Nate nodded. “Yes sir. I think even Gen might believe it now, and you know how she is.”

  “Your grandmother used to say ‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of.’ It’s from Shakespeare, I think.”

  “Gen would know,” Nate said.

  Grandpa nodded. “That she would. Speaking of Gen,” Grandpa continued, “seems you two aren’t spending much time together anymore.”

  Nate shrugged. “She doesn’t exactly fit in with Ricky and Connor and Buddy. She doesn’t like to do the same stuff.”

  Grandpa stood and stretched his arms over his head. “Having new friends is always nice, but don’t forget your old ones. They’re the ones that’ll stick by you through thick and thin.”

  Nate felt like someone had punched him in the stomach, hearing those familiar words.

  “Yes sir,” he mumbled as his grandpa headed outside.

  Nate wandered back to his bedroom. He flung himself upon his bed, his eyes wandering around the tiny room: the faded curtains, the bookcase made of cinder blocks and plastic milk crates. His wandering gaze came to rest upon the one red high-top tennis shoe in his closet. Oh, how he missed wearing those old sneakers, how they seemed to know every nook and cranny of his feet. He’d never been able to bring himself to go back to Goofy Golf to look for the other shoe. He sighed and looked away.

  “Sometimes I wish it’d never happened,” he said to the photograph of his parents. “I wish it could be taken back.”

  But how to undo the luck the lightning had given him? Nate wondered as he listened to the rain drum against the trailer windows. He could only think of one person in all of Franklin County who might know.

  Chum Bailey sat by himself on Mr. Tom’s school bus, thinking about friendship. It
made him sad that the only friends he had in the world, Nate and Gen, were not friends with each other anymore. It seemed to Chum, whose best friend had always been Mr. Bowditch the cat, that if you were lucky enough to have a friend, you were lucky enough. If you had more than one friend, why, you were just about the luckiest son of a pirate there was. You didn’t call them names and you didn’t throw them over for new friends; you stuck by them even when you were mad. The night before, he’d wished on the first star that Nate and Gen would work things out and they could all be friends.

  The bus doors closed. Someone slid into the seat beside Chum and whispered, “Where’s Gen?”

  Chum gaped at the apparition sitting low in the seat beside him: a sweatshirt three sizes too big, hood pulled over the face, dark sunglasses, and gloves. But what really threw him for a loop was the badly scribbled mustache on its upper lip.

  “Who the heck are you?” Chum asked.

  The vision slunk lower down into the seat. “Shhh, not so loud. It’s me, Nate.”

  “Nate?” the big boy asked in disbelief. “What in blue blazes —”

  “Shhhhh!” Nate hissed. “I’m in disguise.”

  Chum frowned. “But it’s not Halloween.”

  Nate looked from one side of the bus to the other. “I know that. I changed clothes after school. I don’t want anyone on the bus to recognize me.”

  “I thought you liked everybody recognizing you, being so popular now and all.”

  “I was, but it’s gotten too crazy. Folks are fighting over me and because of me.”

  The two boys contemplated this fact as the bus bumped along the sandy road.

  “Why are you riding the bus?” Nate asked.

  “I’m going over to Gen’s house to check in on her,” Chum replied. “Friends do that,” he added.

  “Is she still mad at me?”

  Chum frowned. “You hurt her bad, Nate. That’s why she hasn’t been coming to school, and you know how Gen feels about school.”

  Nate’s heart sunk low as a crab’s belly. He surely did know how much Gen loved school. She had to be the only kid in Paradise Beach and probably in all of Florida who dreaded summer vacation.

  The bus rolled to a stop beside the tall pine tree. Chum grabbed his plastic grocery bag full of books for Gen and stood.

  Nate slunk out of the bus behind the big boy. At the bottom of the steps, Mr. Tom called out, “Lookin’ good, Nate.” Nate sighed. Chum had blown his cover.

  The sun beat down hot as blazes as they walked up the red clay road, through the pines, to The Church of the One True Redeemer and Everlasting Light. Sweat trickled down Nate’s back and plastered his hair to his head underneath the sweatshirt hood. He wiped at the sweat on his upper lip. His hand came back smeared with mustache.

  “I need to ask Gen about something. Do you think she’ll talk to me?” he asked.

  Chum studied a crow up in a tree. “Hard to say. What is it you need to talk with her about?”

  “I got to find out how to get rid of this good luck. I figure she’s about the only person smart enough to know how to do that.”

  “You want to be unlucky again? Why would you?”

  “Well, I don’t know that I want to be unlucky again,” he tried to explain. “Not if I can help it. But I want things to be more like the way they were before I got struck by lightning.”

  Chum shook his head. His mama always said folks were never satisfied with what the good Lord gave them, and that certainly seemed to be the case with Nate.

  He shrugged. “I reckon we’ll see when we get there.”

  The two boys stood in the shadows of the pine forest, gazing across the oyster shell parking lot of The Church of the One True Redeemer and Everlasting Light. As always, the doors to the church stood wide open to the sun and the salt air and anyone who happened to wander by. Nate heard the flutelike voices of Ruth and Rebecca drifting from the sanctuary. He ached to see them, but his shins still smarted from the kicking they’d given him a few days before.

  “Maybe you should go in and talk with her first,” he said, running his hand along a bumpy shinbone.

  He watched from the shadows of the trees as Chum ambled across the parking lot. He heard the laughing, singing, squabbling, tripping voices of the girls call out, “Charles! It’s Charles!” and watched them fling their arms around Chum’s waist and attempt the long climb up to his arms. Nate’s throat knotted and burned as boy and twins disappeared into the dark coolness of the church.

  “Where’s your sister?” Chum asked the twins as they investigated the pockets on his shirt where he was known to keep lemon drops.

  “She’s up on the roof,” Ruthie said. “She won’t come down for nothing.”

  “She’s making Mama worried,” said Rebecca.

  The girls swung around Chum’s neck and rode him piggyback up the stairs to the living quarters.

  “She says she’s busy thinking,” Ruthie added.

  Chum poked his head into the kitchen, where Mrs. Beam was just pulling a tray of something wonderful-smelling out of the oven. Her face broke open with relief at the sight of the boy.

  “Oh, Charles, I’m glad you’re here. Maybe you can get Gen to come in off that roof and eat something.”

  Chum remembered once when Mr. Bowditch got himself up a tree because of some dog and wouldn’t come down for hours and hours. He had climbed up the tree in the middle of a hurricane (well, it had seemed almost as bad as a hurricane), branches swinging every which way and rain about to drown him, and lured Mr. Bowditch down with a snickerdoodle and a bowl of sweet milk.

  “May I have some milk and cookies, please?” he asked.

  Mrs. Beam blinked. “Well, of course, Charles, but what about Gen?”

  He took the still-warm cookies and the glass of milk. “I reckon if it worked on a cat, it’ll work on Gen,” he said, and headed for the open window.

  Chum eased out the window and onto the roof. There sat Gen, perched like a crow beside her weather station, peering through a pair of binoculars.

  “Hey,” he called.

  She didn’t even turn to look at him.

  He edged over closer. “I brought you some cookies and milk,” he said. “The cookies are still warm from the oven. They’re chocolate chip and oatmeal — your favorite.” Chum’s stomach rumbled in reminder that they were, in fact, his favorite too.

  Gen lowered the binoculars and fixed him with a look. “Why did you bring Nathaniel here?”

  Chum swallowed hard and inched a little closer. He remembered how Mr. Bowditch had hissed at him up in the tree. He put on his best cat-soothing voice and replied, “Nate needs your help, Gen. He says you’re likely the only one smart enough to help him.”

  “Humph,” she snorted. She raised the binoculars back to her eyes. “What the heck’s he doing all bundled up in a stupid hooded sweatshirt when it’s” — Gen lowered the binoculars and squinted at her weather station — “eighty-nine degrees with a relative humidity of sixty-three percent?”

  “He’s in disguise because everybody’s fighting over him,” he relayed, although it really didn’t make a whole heck of a lot of sense to him.

  “I wouldn’t know how that is,” Gen mumbled. She scooted over next to Chum and took a cookie and the glass of milk.

  Chum smiled. Just like Mr. Bowditch.

  “Anyways,” he said, “Nate really wants things to go back more the way they were before he got struck by lightning and he got lucky and popular and all. He says you’re probably the only one who would know how to make that work.”

  Gen frowned. “How should I know?” She moved away from Chum, but not before he caught the teary glint in her eye and the stubborn set to her chin. “Besides, give me one good reason I should help him after the things he said to me.” Her chin quivered.

  Chum sighed. “Because, Gen, up until a little while ago, he was your best friend in the world.”

  He waited in the hot sun on top of the roof for her reply. None came. He
left the plate of cookies and headed carefully back toward the window with the glass of milk. Just as he was half in the window, Gen called out, “If he really believes everything changed because of the lightning strike, then it’s only logical he’d have to get struck again for it to change back.”

  Chum frowned. “Okay, Gen. I’ll tell him.”

  The big boy took the glass of milk back to the kitchen. Mrs. Beam looked at him and said, “So? Did she come in?”

  Chum shook his head. “People are a lot more complicated than cats.”

  “She said what?” Nate asked for the third time.

  Chum pushed the hood off of Nate’s head so he could hear better. “I said she’s still mad at you!” he hollered. “And she said if you want your luck to change back, you’d probably have to get struck by lightning again!”

  Nate shook his head and gazed up at the figure sitting on top of the church. “I heard you the first time, Chum, but how the heck do I get struck by lightning again?” Not to mention that even if he could, who’s to say it wouldn’t kill him this time? “It’s not like I planned it the last time.”

  Chum and Nate took the shortcut through the woods over to the Sweet Magnolia RV and Trailer Park. Dark clouds scudded across the sky, covering the sun. Thunder rumbled in the distance.

  “Well, there was that Benjamin Franklin feller, with his kite and key. We studied him in science class this year,” Chum said.

  Nate shivered despite the sweatshirt, and his head pounded. “I remember that too,” he said, eyeing the sky nervously. “But I don’t have a kite.”

  Thunder cracked, closer this time. Lightning flashed so close, the hair stood up on his arms and neck. As if they had a mind of their own, his legs and feet sprinted as fast as they could go to the trailer.

  “Hang on, Nate! Wait up!”