The Higher Power of Lucky (6 page)

Too late to hide the specimens. Lucky scooped them into their boxes, which you have to be very careful about or their legs or wings break off, but Brigitte had already seen. Instead of acting mad and making Lucky scrub the entire table with Ajax—not just the little place where the specimens had actually touched it—Brigitte went to the sink and leaned on it, gazing out the window.

“Oh, Lucky,” she said, “bugs again on the table.”

Lucky noticed that the envelope in Brigitte’s hand was from her own father. She had recognized his handwriting. Every month he sent a check, but never a letter, even though every month Lucky still thought he might. She said, “Did my father send a letter to me?”

Brigitte sighed. She kept on staring out the window. “No, only the little check that is never enough.” She looked like a beautiful daytime TV lady doctor in her pale green hospital scrubs from the Sierra City Thrift Store.

“I have twelve dollars and fifty-six cents saved from my job at the Found Object Wind Chime Museum,” Lucky offered. “We can add that to the money he sent.”

Brigitte answered by lifting a shoulder and poofing air, her way of saying, “Forget it.”

The phone rang just as Lucky realized she hadn’t put the wet clothes in the dryer. It was Lincoln.

“Hold on,” Lucky told him. Then to Brigitte, “I forgot about the laundry. I’ll do it in a sec.”

“No,” said Brigitte in a faraway voice, a voice that was thinking of other things. She slid a cassette into the tape player, the one with the French songs that Brigitte knew every word of by heart. “It does not matter,” she said. “I do it.”

“What’s up?” Lucky said into the phone.

“Nothing. Why?” Lincoln was not a good conversationalist.

“Lincoln,
you
called
me
.”

“Oh! Right. It’s commodities day.”

“I know. We already got ours. There’s some weird orange cheese this time.” Lucky could hear Lincoln adjusting the phone. She knew he was tying a knot.

Lincoln said, “Want to meet up at Short Sammy’s in a while?” Lucky and Lincoln liked to see how Sammy cooked the free Government food. He had a very unique way of cooking, and he liked having company.

“Okay. First I have to scrub the table because of the scorpion, flies, and tarantula hawk wasp that I—” She broke off just as Brigitte screamed and slammed the dryer door shut.

“Hang on, Lincoln,” Lucky said and dropped the phone. In a second Brigitte flew by, grabbing Lucky’s hand. She ran outside, pulling Lucky after her. HMS Beagle followed excitedly.

“What happened?” Lucky asked.

Brigitte’s eyes were huge and her face was red. She seemed to be sending off waves of heat in the bright sunlight.

“What happened,” Brigitte said breathlessly, “is that a
snake
”—she said the word “snake” like most people would say “rotting dead pus-filled rat”—“a
snake
is in the dryer.” Brigitte pointed dramatically toward the laundry area at the end of the kitchen trailer.

In a very calm and relaxed way, to show Brigitte that snakes were actually clean and not repulsive, Lucky said, “I see, a snake’s in the dryer.” She said it like snakes in dryers were not a very big deal. She leaned casually against the aluminum side of the trailer. “What kind of snake?”

Brigitte pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. “A
giant
snake!” she said.

Brigitte didn’t even like to see
pictures
of snakes, which was really, really silly as far as Lucky was concerned, because a picture couldn’t hurt anyone. But Lucky knew that to Brigitte an
actual snake in the dryer
was a quadruple gazillion times worse than a picture.

Lucky ran back inside, with Brigitte behind her.

“Do not open the door of the dryer!” Brigitte shouted. “She is in there!”

“Who?”

“The viper! I think she snuck inside the trailer and climbed up into the dryer!” Brigitte’s hand and arm showed a snake slithering toward the dryer. “We have to seal it so she cannot escape. Quick—get that sticky gray tape.”

“Well, what kind of snake is it?” Lucky asked again.

“I am sure she is a viper—a rattlesnake! Imagine to live in a place where just by doing the laundry you can be killed!”

Privately, Lucky admired snakes because they were very, very highly adapted to their habitat. One amazing true fact she had read was that snakes actually started out as creatures with legs but evolved to
not
having legs because they could move around better without them. In fact, Lucky figured the average person went around thinking,
Those poor snakes sure have been waiting a long time to evolve some legs.
She would never have guessed
not
having legs would be better than having them.

But she doubted that Brigitte knew enough about snakes to tell whether it was a rattlesnake or some harmless kind.

Lucky said, “Brigitte, what does it look like? What color?”

Brigitte shrugged and looked insulted, as if the question had a completely obvious answer. She said, “She is the color of a snake.”

Lucky sighed. “What shape is its head?”

A lot of times when Brigitte didn’t know the answer to something, either she acted like it was a dumb question, or she
pretended
to know the answer, or else she veered around with an answer that wasn’t really an answer at all. “Lucky, we will look at the shape of her head after she has died—when it is safe.”

“You mean when it dies of old age?” Lucky couldn’t believe how weird
that
plan was. “That could probably take
years
. We’ll have to hang up the wet laundry outside and the towels won’t have California softness.”

“Lucky,” said Brigitte, crossing her arms in front of her chest. “Please go get that gray sticky tape right now.”

“Wait—yikes. I left Lincoln on the phone. Be right back.”

Lucky picked up the phone. “There’s a snake in the dryer,” she said.

“Miles’s grandmother had one in her dryer once. It came in through the vent going to the outside of the mobile home.”

“What did she do?”

“Thirty minutes on ‘normal cycle.’”

“You’re kidding!”

There was a little silence on Lincoln’s end. “No,” he said. “That’s what she did. Her dryer doesn’t have a see-through door. Does yours?”

“No, it’s just pure metal. So what?”

“She couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a rattler, so she killed it.”

“Brigitte wants to duct-tape the dryer door shut and wait till the snake dies of old age. After that she’ll probably want to duct-tape the whole entire outside of the trailers.”

Lincoln said, “We could catch a mouse and use it as bait to lure the snake out.”

All of Lincoln’s plans were both simple and complicated. They were tempting, but at the same time they made you feel doubtful before you even got started. But Lucky now had her own idea. “I’ll meet you at Short Sammy’s in about half an hour,” she said, and hung up. She went back to the laundry area with the duct tape and a pair of scissors and gave them to Brigitte.

Brigitte stuck the end of the duct tape on one edge of the dryer, pressing it hard, peeling off more tape and pressing it against the metal, until she had the door very securely fixed. No creature inside the dryer could get out through that door.

Lucky climbed up on top of the dryer, where she could peer out a tiny window.

“What are you doing, Lucky?” Brigitte asked. She was wearing a don’t-you-dare-touch-the-duct-
tape-on-the-dryer-door look.

“Wait a sec,” said Lucky. Still peering out the window, she stomped the heel of her shoe on the dryer. She braced herself against the wall and banged her shoe on the front and the sides of the dryer. Brigitte watched, but one of the good things about her was that she didn’t act like she was the total boss of everything. Especially when it came to the way things worked in Hard Pan versus the way things worked in France, Brigitte was willing to listen to what Lucky had to say.