The Higher Power of Lucky

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.