by Susan Patron
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, borrowed in order to study more about how to find your Higher Power
pencil and notebook to describe specimens
tiny packets of ketchup from McDonald’s
can of beans
the Ten-Strand Round knot
brand-new toothbrush from a teeth-cleaning at the Sierra City clinic, still in its original wrapper so that if she started to lose heart—“to lose heart” being Lucky’s favorite sad but exquisite phrase—she could get out a beautiful never-used toothbrush and make herself feel better
half a tube of toothpaste
bottle of water and bottle of Gatorade
The survival kit had everything she would need to keep from getting bored or too lonely, which are probably the worst dangers of running away.
On the towel she laid out her jacket and a roll of toilet paper. She wished she could take her pillow, but it was too bulky.
In the fridge she found two hard-boiled eggs, four carrots (HMS Beagle loved carrots), the Government Surplus cheese, which no matter how awful it was both she and HMS Beagle could eat in case they started starving to death, Fig Newtons, and a box of dry Jell-O (in a plastic Ziploc bag to ward off ants). HMS Beagle’s kibble in another Ziploc bag.
Lucky looked around.
On the counter was Brigitte’s metal parsley grinder, which Dot had fixed so it worked like new.
Lucky put it on the towel. Then suddenly she went back into the kitchen. She reached up and grabbed the urn with her mother’s remains and her own dried-up tears inside. She added that to the pile and carefully rolled the towel up into a tight but bulky tube. She jammed it into a plastic grocery bag.
Lucky was ready to start running away when she realized that she might never return to the half circle of trailers if the rescuers took her directly to the orphanage in Los Angeles. So she was about to go one last time into Brigitte’s trailer, when she heard blasts of a tugboat coming closer and closer.
Oh, la-la, la-LA, la-LA, la-LA, she thought. I’ll never be able to run away with him here.
“Go away, Miles,” she yelled. “I’m busy!”
“Lucky, the storm is really bad! Everyone’s at the Captain’s house saying the power and the phones will probably go out. Can I come in?”
“No! Go away!”
“Why? I won’t make noises!” Miles let himself in and took short skips to the Formica table. He pulled Are You My Mother? out of his Buy-Mor-Store sack. Its spine had been freshly mended with duct tape. “My grandma fixed my book,” he said.
Lucky had no time to be nice. “That book is wrecked,” she said. “It looks even worse now.”
Miles smoothed the duct tape. “It’s still fine inside,” he said. “Could you read it to me?”
“Miles, get a life. You already know the story by heart, and it’s boring.”
“No, it’s not! The part about the Snort is good, and so is the part where he finds his mother at the end.”
“That bird is an idiot snotwad,” said Lucky. “He doesn’t even know”—Lucky took a breath—“he doesn’t even realize that his mother is in jail!”
Miles sat still, looking down at his book. “She is not,” he said in a small voice.
“Yes, she is! Your grandmother said so.” Lucky leaned over Miles, her meanness gland pumping. “And I’m not your mother either! I’m not taking care of you! So go home!”
Miles looked up at her with his eyes full of tears. He threw the book on the floor and kicked it. He started crying hard. “I’m never coming back!” he shouted, and ran out into the wild brown wind.
Good, thought Lucky. Then for no reason she got a sudden exploding idea. She rushed to Brigitte’s trailer and flung open the closet. The perfumy smell of Brigitte wafted out of it. There were jackets and a couple of dresses, and neatly folded piles of surgical pants and shirts. At the very end of the rod was Brigitte’s red silk dress, in a clear plastic dry-cleaner’s bag.
The dress felt like a pile of feathers, almost too light and silky to touch. It made Lucky feel she should wash her hands. It was a dress you would wear only for something very important, like coming to California to become someone’s Guardian. The tag said “La Fortune, Galleries Lafayette, Paris.” Brigitte hadn’t worn it since the day she arrived, but Lucky still remembered the dancy twirly shimmeringness of that dress.
Lucky yanked off her jeans and top and left them on the floor. She pulled the silk dress over her head. The hem came to the tops of her socks. It was too loose to really fit her, but it felt different next to her skin, not at all like her regular clothes. It turned her into someone else, someone beautiful and sophisticated, who could make a dessert that had flames coming out of it on purpose. Her regular clothes were faded from many washings and from the sun, but the redness of this dress was the same thing for your eyes as a sonic boom is for your ears, or a jalapeño pepper is for your mouth.
She felt herself through the fabric and twisted like when you do the hootchy-kootchy, to move the silk against her skin. She felt sort of French and sort of lit-up and wished suddenly that Lincoln were there to see her. This was so strange to her, the flash-thought of Lincoln out of nowhere, that she made the thought go into a place inside that wasn’t her brain, so she wouldn’t have to think about it.
Lucky spread Brigitte’s sunscreen on her hands, arms, face, and neck, carefully not getting much of it on the dress. Outside the wind was stronger, whooshing noisily. She rummaged through the kitchen tool carton until she found a dust mask that you used when you sanded the curved wood walls inside the trailers. She wasn’t thinking in the same careful Running-Away-Project way as before, because now she had turned into a Brigitte-type of person.
The phone rang. It was Miles’s grandmother, Mrs. Prender.
“Is Miles there?” she shouted. “I seen the school bus come back early.”
“No,” Lucky said.
“I want him home—the wind’s getting bad. You seen him?”
“No,” Lucky lied.
“Well, you do, make him stay put and call me so I can pick him up in the car.”
“Okay, Mrs. Prender.” She hung up.
Lucky considered swiping Brigitte’s passport, because that was another way to stop her from leaving. But it wasn’t the best way. The best way would be if Brigitte made her own decision to stay because she loved Lucky. And in order for Brigitte to realize how much she loved her ward, the ward had to run away. Then Brigitte would feel sorry and worried and abandoned, and that would make her understand exactly how Lucky felt.
The phone rang again. Lucky glared at it. She was way too busy for a zillion phone calls. This time it was Lincoln. She put one hand on her silk hip.
“Everyone’s looking for Miles,” he said.
“He’s probably at Dot’s or at the Found Object Wind Chime Museum and Visitor Center.”
“You think—whoa!—our power just went out. Is yours on?”
“Yeah. Listen, I have to go.”
“If you see Miles, tell him his grandma wants him.”
Lucky held the receiver and felt Lincoln waiting at the other end. She realized she was probably talking to him for the last time, unless they allowed the orphans in the L.A. orphanage to make phone calls, which she doubted. Everyone was so worried about Miles, when it was she who would soon be gone forever.
“Lincoln,” she said, and struggled around in her mind to figure out what she wanted to say. “You are…the best knot artist I ever met.”
Lincoln was silent, either because he was too infected with shyness or because it was another Sign and he was guessing the truth. Very gently and sadly, she hung up.
17. Hms Beagle Disobeys
A part of her mind was telling Lucky that if she ran away she would lose her job at the Found Object Wind Chime Museum and Visitor Center. That certain brain compartment also worried about getting in deep trouble and being sent away.
But a bossier, louder crevice of Lucky’s brain argued that she had alrea
dy decided about running away. There were already all of her plans and all the supplies, and all the hard work of running away. All that would be wasted if she gave up now.
Then another part of Lucky’s brain reminded her that there was the new problem of Miles. She should be helping to find him. It was her fault that he was missing, even though, she reasoned, she’d had to get rid of him in order to run away herself. But this particular Running-Away was her Running-Away. If Miles had also run away, instead of just, for instance, hiding out under Dot’s back porch, it would be like sharing it, and Lucky did not want to share it. If there was glory, she wanted all the glory. And if there were problems, well, they were his mother’s problems, the price she paid for being in jail.
Lucky put her dust mask on to make herself quit thinking and just go. She snatched up Miles’s book and crammed it into the plastic sack with her rolled-up towel. Then she got her arms into her backpack straps, jumping to center it on her back. It weighed eight hundred pounds.
She soaked a dishtowel and draped it over her head, using Brigitte’s sweatband to anchor it on top and safety-pinning it together under her chin. She looped the plastic sack over her wrist. Lucky and HMS Beagle ran down the trailer steps.
It was way, way noisier outside. The canvas awning strained and flapped as the wind roared; the trailers creaked and rocked on their blocks. The wind blew toward the open desert, which was where Lucky was heading, so at least she had it at her back.
With HMS Beagle trotting ahead, they crossed the invisible boundary of the edge of Hard Pan into the Bureau of Land Management land, leaving the town and walking onto the vast Mojave Desert. Lucky felt that it was good she was so well prepared—otherwise, she’d have been a tiny bit scared.
They struggled down the sandy road that led across the desert to some abandoned mines in the distant hills. Lucky knew it was important to stay on the rutted road to keep from getting lost. She kept a tight grip on her plastic sack, which twisted and strained to fly away. Her dishtowel flapped and made it hard to see, but was cool and kept some of the swirling sand out of her hair. Uprooted plants and old junk whipped past.
After about twenty minutes Lucky needed to pee. She went off to the side, watching for snakes and scorpions and nasty types of cactus, and squatted, pulling her underpants down and the silk dress up to her waist. She planted one shoe on the handles of the plastic sack to keep it from flapping away.
It was hard keeping her balance with the backpack on, but she didn’t want to take the thing off and then have to put it on again with no chair or counter to back up to. She realized that the toilet paper was wrapped up in the towel inside the sack, and undoing everything to get it would be impossible. Right now for peeing it was okay—you just stayed squatting and the wind dried everything in a quick minute. But later on Lucky would need to organize her stuff better, with the toilet paper on top.
As she lurched to her feet and pulled her underpants up at the same time, the whole weight of the backpack seemed to shift and she lost her balance and fell backward. Stuff in her backpack crunched and something mashed into her spine. It made her feel discouraged, like if you took the word apart into two sections of dis and couraged. It was getting harder and harder to stay couraged.
She rolled over onto her hands and knees and stayed that way for a while, panting into her mask. Hard little rocks pressed against her knees through the silk and nipped her palms. Not a soul in the world knew where she was, or cared. She was nothing but a speck on the surface of the Earth. Lucky almost didn’t have the strength to stand up again, but then HMS Beagle went bounding away down the road.
Even my dog abandons me, thought Lucky, but she heaved herself up, clutching the plastic bag, and plowed on.
Lucky stole her technique of keeping going from the anonymous twelve-step people, whose slogan is “One Day at a Time.” If you think of undoing a big habit day after day for the entire rest of your life, you can’t bear it because it’s too overwhelming and hard, so you give up. But if you think only of getting through this one day, and don’t worry about later, you can do it. Lucky used the “One Day at a Time” idea by putting one foot in front of the other without thinking about what would happen later. She knew she could do one step and then another step and then another step and then another step as long as she thought “One Step at a Time.”
But the wind was a terribly strong enemy. Sometimes it pushed her so hard from behind that she thought it would knock her over. Once a huge thing that turned out to be most of a washing machine hurtled past her, and she saw a sheet and pillowcase—probably ripped by the wind from someone’s clothesline—sailing out to the desert.
When HMS Beagle suddenly veered across the path to sniff at a pile of old rags, Lucky did not pause. She pressed on, believing the dugouts must be close now, though she couldn’t see very far in any direction. The dugouts would give shelter from the wind. After a while, she looked back through the blast of dust. HMS Beagle was sitting by the rags.
“HMS Beagle, come!” she said, but her words were whooshed away by the wind. Lucky gestured with her whole arm for the dog to come. HMS Beagle sat.
Lucky grimly turned away and went on. Of course HMS Beagle was going to leave her all by herself! What worse thing could happen?
When the road curved around a low hill, Lucky suddenly couldn’t get her bearings. Was this some fork she’d forgotten about? She didn’t remember the road curving like that, which made her heart pump out waves of panic. The project was to run away, not to get lost. She looked behind her: nothing but the thick blanket of brown dust. But the hill on her right provided a buffer, so instead of turning back she pulled the dishcloth away from her face so she could peer around.
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 a
nimal 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 herself. 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.
