The Higher Power of Lucky (3 page)
Even though it was only Friday afternoon, and her report on the life cycle of the ant wasn’t due until Monday, Lucky got out her notebook, thinking she could finish by dinner. Then Lincoln phoned.
“Hi, Lucky,” he said.
“Hey.”
Silence. Lucky knew Lincoln had a hard time talking on the phone because he needed both hands for tying knots on a string or a cord. When he was about seven, Lincoln’s brain had begun squeezing out a powerful knot-tying secretion that went through his capillaries and made his hands want to tie knots. He’d learned how to tie about a million different ones, plus bends and hitches.
She heard a crash when he dropped the phone and then a jostling while he got it cradled between his ear and his shoulder. This was the usual thing that happened when they called each other.
“Listen,” he said. “Do you have any of those thick permanent-marker pens? A black one?”
“I think so. What for?”
“It’s that sign Miles asked about, the one he noticed on the way back from school today.”
“‘Pop. 43’?”
“No, after that. Right when the school bus pulls into Hard Pan.”
“Yeah,” Lucky said. It was a diamond-shaped orangy-yellow traffic sign. Miles was in kindergarten and was learning to read, which made him interested in finding out what every sign said. Lucky was glad that there were only a few signs on the long highway to and from school in Sierra City. “What about it?”
“I’ll explain later. Bring the marker and meet me there in a few minutes.”
“This doesn’t have anything to do with
Knot News
, does it?” Lincoln got a newsletter every month from the International Guild of Knot Tyers, which he was one of the youngest members of. It was a fairly boring newsletter to Lucky, but Lincoln read every page minutely, like he was memorizing it, and then he told Lucky all about things like what makes a good fid (which is some kind of knotting tool). Lucky knew that the latest
Knot News
had arrived recently.
“Nope,” Lincoln said. “It’s about the
sign
. Just meet me there. You’ll see.”
HMS Beagle was already standing at the screen door, looking out. A lot of times she knew what was going to happen even before Lucky did. “Okay,” Lucky said, thinking she could also capture a few ants and glue them to her report for extra credit.
She hung up and went to look at herself in the little mirror on the door of the cabinet by her bed. The trouble about Lucky, and this was a big problem she couldn’t solve, had to do with being all one color.
Her eyes, skin, and hair, including her wispy straight eyebrows, were all the same color, a color Lucky thought of as sort of sandy or mushroomy. The story she told herself to explain it was that on the day before her birth, the color enzymes were sorting themselves in big vats. Unfortunately, Lucky decided to be born a little ahead of schedule, and the enzymes weren’t quite finished sorting—there was only one color-vat ready and the color in that vat was sandy-mushroom. So Lucky got dipped in it, head to toe, there being no time for nice finishing touches like green eyes or black hair, and then,
wham
, she was born and it was too late except for a few freckles.
Before hoisting on her survival kit backpack, Lucky rummaged in it for a small plastic bottle of mineral oil. A remedy she’d thought of to the all-one-color situation, since Brigitte wouldn’t let her use actual makeup, was to dab a tiny bit of oil on her eyebrows, which made them glisten so you could at least
see
them.
One side of Lucky’s mind wondered if Lincoln noticed her hair-eyes-skin-all-one-sandy/mushroomy-color aspect, but the other side doubted it because he was always absorbed in his knots or in
Knot News
.
Lucky found the marker and her floppy hat, and she and HMS Beagle went outside. Brigitte was watering her big tubs with herbs growing in them.
“This parsley is going already to seed,” Brigitte told Lucky. “The seed packet says in hot weather parsley may bolt early. This word makes the parsley sound like a horse running away.” She looked at Lucky’s hat. “And you are bolting too, right before dinner?”
“I’m meeting Lincoln—he needs to borrow the marker.”
“Please come back before the sun goes down,
ma puce
.” Brigitte pinched tiny white flowers off of a bushy plant, and Lucky smelled the herb Brigitte put into spaghetti sauce. She said, “I would like to catch that rabbit who eats my basil.”
Lucky did not tell Brigitte that it would have been easy to trap the cottontail. She knew Brigitte would skin it and cook it, and Lucky did not want Peter Rabbit for dinner.
She and HMS Beagle set out for the town’s main road—five minutes if you took the shortcut behind the old abandoned saloon.
When they got to the sign, Lincoln hadn’t arrived yet, so Lucky shrugged out of her backpack and dug around in it for a Ziploc bag. The old rutted blacktop road was too hot to be near—it was much hotter than the sandy ground—so Lucky and HMS Beagle went off to the side by some bushes to look for ants. Pretty soon the Beag found a little lace of shade under a creosote to lie down in, and Lucky found some ants.
As she watched them traveling along in a couple of lanes to and from a quarter-size hole, Lucky had a sudden large revealing thought about ants. At first she felt sorry for them because they were so tiny and could be killed so easily. She could kill ten or twenty at one time, probably. But then she realized that, with ants, it wasn’t so much the one individual ant that counted. They all stayed seriously on their jobs and none of them went off on tangents the way people do. For instance, you didn’t have one ant deciding to meet a friend and another ant knocking off work early and another ant lying around staring at the clouds.
No, the ants acted like one single machine, instead of zillions of separate tiny minds and bodies. They had good teamwork. If some died, the others didn’t stand around worrying about it. For ants, there was definitely no “I” in “team.”
So as Lucky was realizing that, to an ant, its Higher Power might be the whole colony
itself
, Lincoln sauntered up. HMS Beagle whapped her tail in the sand, not getting up from her shady spot.
“I was thinking,” Lucky said, “about the lives of ants—which is different from the life
cycle
of ants. I mean, think about if some of them die. The others just go on like they didn’t even notice. You can’t even make an
impression
on them.”
“Hmmm,” Lincoln said. He held a loop of string between two fingers and threaded one end through it and then back under. Lincoln could be hard to keep a conversation going with. He listened, but he didn’t necessarily
contribute
.
“If you were an ant,” Lucky went on, “what would your Higher Power be?”
Lincoln scrunched his eyes at her. “No idea,” he said, and went to pat HMS Beagle, who stretched out on her back and waved her paws in the air to show him she wanted her chest rubbed. He said to Lucky, “How come your eyebrows are kind of wet?”
Lucky smoothed the mineral oil on her eyebrows with her fingers. “It’s a new beauty product,” she explained. “For glistening.”
HMS Beagle’s ribcage looked much more huge when she was lying on her back than when she was standing. Lincoln scratched it. “Your eyebrows really go…with the rest of you,” he said without looking up.
Lucky didn’t have the slightest clue what to say to that. She was pretty sure—but not positive—that it was a compliment. She scooped five or six ants and some sand into the little bag and carefully zipped it closed. “Well,” she finally said, “what’s the deal with the sign?”
“Did you
read
it?”
Lucky skirted around to the front of the sign, which was bolted to a metal post, and studied the words in large black capital letters against the orangy-yellow background:
SLOW
CHILDREN
AT
PLAY
Lucky frowned. “So?” she asked.
“That sign is about
us
,” Lincoln said. “Where’s the pen?”
“Lincoln, what are you going to do? It’s
illegal
to draw on a traffic sign. It’s probably illegal even to touch it.” Lucky worried about Lincoln getting in trouble. His mother, who worked part-time as a librarian in Sierra City, wanted him to grow up to be the President of the United States. Lucky knew that if he ran for President, during his campaign his opponent would uncover every single bad thing he’d ever done in his life. Someone would find out that when he was ten years old he graffitied
SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY
and Lincoln could lose the election.
Lincoln’s father was an Older Dad with a pension—he was twenty-three years older than Lincoln’s mom—and looked more like a grandfather than a father. He drove around the desert in his homemade dune buggy searching for historic pieces of barbed wire, and then he sold them on eBay. Lincoln’s dad said he shouldn’t worry about becoming the President of the United States until he was in college. Lincoln’s mom said he should worry about it
every day, starting now
. But the only thing Lincoln actually worried about, he had told Lucky, was how to get enough money to go to the annual convention of the International Guild of Knot Tyers in England, and then how to make his parents agree to let him go.
“Lucky,” Lincoln explained, “people see that sign and they think, ‘Huh. Slow children. Kids around here aren’t too smart.’ Or else they think, ‘Gosh, these Hard Pan kids don’t move too fast. Must be ’cause of the heat.’”
Lucky had never thought of these interpretations. She figured everyone read the sign and thought,
Okay, time to
slow
down
because there are children playing.
“And?” she asked.
“Just give me the marker.”
Lucky looked around to see if anyone was paying attention. Down at the side of the dirt road that went off the main paved one, a couple of pairs of boots were sticking out from under someone’s old VW van. The wearers of the boots were pounding on the van’s stomach. She heard the soft hooting calls of an owl who’d woken up early. The little glass observation tower at the Captain’s house, where he liked to sit and watch what was going on around town, looked empty—and anyway she knew the heat in it would be too much to bear right now. There were, as usual, no cars on the road. She handed over the marker.
Lincoln put his string in his pocket and rubbed away the dust beside the word
SLOW
with the hem of his T-shirt. Lucky was afraid he was going to try to fit
DOWN
next to it, but she knew he couldn’t, and it would look bad. The sharp upside-down V of the top of the diamond came too close to
SLOW
.
But instead Lincoln did something brilliant. Next to
SLOW
, he drew two neat perfect-size dots, one like a period and the other a little above it. Lucky knew it was a colon and it made the sign mean, “You must drive slow: There are children at play.”
“Wow,” she said. “That is…presidential.”
