The Thing About Luck

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The chirp of crickets accompanied the soft sounds of country music—the music a little scratchy from the cheap radio, the chirping strong and clear and seemingly coming from everywhere in the world all at once. In the dim morning I could see Robbie inside the cab of a combine, cleaning the windows. It was six a.m. Jiichan and Mick each loaded a combine onto a trailer attached to a semi. The music was coming from one of the big rigs, with Mr. Dark sitting in the cab waiting for everyone to load up.

This is what our group was bringing to Oklahoma:

Jiichan and Mick would each drive a big rig. Rory and Mr. Dark would ride together in one of the pickups. Obaachan would drive the other pickup. Then Rory would drive one of the pickups back to Texas, and Mr. Dark would drive one of the big rigs back. Or something like that. It all made my head spin.

Once we got to the Franklin place and started cutting, Jiichan and Mick would dump directly into the grain trailer instead of into a grain cart. Then Obaachan would drive the semi, with the grain trailer attached, to and from an elevator. She’d gotten her commercial driver’s license a couple of years earlier, so she was allowed.

As we set out around six thirty, Jiichan was still sick, but he was trying hard to pretend he was fine. He’d told Mrs. Parker that he and Obaachan were feeling well. Maybe that was the wrong thing to say, because now Obaachan had to drive the pickup to Oklahoma, though it would have made more sense for Mr. Dark to drive us. Mr. Dark was getting a rest because he hadn’t slept well.

But since the drive wasn’t long, I thought both Jiichan and Obaachan could make it. Jaz and I did jan ken pon to decide who had to ride with Obaachan. I lost. “Errrrr,” Obaachan kept saying. She didn’t talk much, just seemed absorbed in her pain.

After a while I fell asleep. When I opened my eyes, we were parked by the side of the highway. Everyone except me had gathered around Obaachan. She was lying on her back on the roadside.

“How long has my grandmother been there?” I asked, getting out of the pickup.

“About ten minutes,” Mick said. “I don’t know why yer grandparents came when they can barely work.”

“They work just as hard as you,” I said, but he didn’t respond. “Obaachan, can you get up?” I asked, kneeling by her side.

She held out her hands. Jaz and I each took a hand and pulled her up. She seemed surprisingly light, even more so than usual, as if she were fading away into nothing this morning.

I was surprised to see Obaachan get in the passenger side. They must all have been talking while I slept. Now Mr. Dark would drive the semi Jiichan had been driving, and Jiichan would drive us in the pickup.

Jaz climbed into the truck after me.

We all started off again. “I tell you I drive,” Obaachan said. “Stubborn old man.”

“You stubborn old woman,” Jiichan said. “I can drive.”

“Who old? You older than me!”

“Only one month older!”

“Thirty-five days! That more than month!”

It amazed me that they could argue about the smallest things even when they were trying to do something nice for each other. Each of them wanted to drive in order to save the other from having to. “They’re expressing love for each other,” my dad had once said while he was watching a football game. “That’s just the way they talk. Down in front—I just missed a touchdown!”

Before I got malaria, I used to think that my dad loved sports more than he loved me. But then while I was sick, my whole family practically moved into my hospital room. I had a vague, almost hallucinogenic memory of them drifting around the room like silent ghosts. I felt like I was alive and they were the walking dead. We were in two different worlds. But in my world I just knew how badly my father wanted me to get well. In fact, I knew everything. I did.

“How far are we?” I asked Obaachan now.

“You need sleep” was all she said.

Then I thought of Mick and felt anger rise in me. Jiichan happened to have gotten sick, but otherwise, he worked just as much and just as hard as Mick. And Obaachan and I cooked for everyone every day. We were all doing good jobs, and he had no right to say what he’d said. I didn’t like Mick at all.

I turned my head toward the window, my mind filled with evil thoughts about Mick. I wished he would fall out of the truck and get run over by another truck. Then I felt guilty for thinking that. But you know how it is. You can’t stop yourself from thinking something. At least, that’s what I believed. My parents agreed with me, but my grandparents didn’t. In fact, all that meditating I did was supposed to help me think nicer thoughts. Sometimes it was hard, though.

Maybe that was why I kept thinking about A Separate Peace. Gene was jealous of Finny, and then one day he acted on that jealousy by shaking the branch so that Finny fell to the ground. I had decided that Gene shook the branch on purpose. I didn’t want to do something horrible like that in the future. It scared me that I might have evil inside of me. That was why I never argued when Jiichan said I should try to meditate and do my breathing exercises. This would help me to open up my heart more.

I closed my eyes again.

After a long time I heard Mick on the radio saying we had reached the motel Mrs. Parker had booked for us.

“We’re going to drop the machines at the farm,” Mick said. “It’s a bit up the road. Yukiko, why don’t ya get our rooms? Tosh, ya ought to come to the farm after ya drop yer family off.”

Jiichan pulled into a gravel lot below a sign reading WHEATLAND MOTEL. A small group of people were just leaving the motel. They were probably wheaties like us. I could tell somehow.

I stayed in the pickup because I had just decided to follow Jiichan around all day to make sure he was okay. Jaz got out with Obaachan and cried loudly into the wind, “For I am the great LEGO builder Jaz Miyamoto! I come to conquer your state!” When we reached the farm, Rory was already unloading a combine. Then he got in a semi without a word and set off for Texas again. Mr. Dark climbed into a pickup and drove off. I had no idea how everyone was operating on so little sleep.

Jiichan put a weird trying-to-appear-fine grin on his face. Mick cut a swath of wheat with a combine, then climbed into the bin with a moisture meter. “Too moist,” he called out. We hopped back into the pickup and returned to the motel to check in and sleep while the wheat dried.

Obaachan and Jaz were sitting on a bench outside the office. She got up when she saw us and handed Mick his keycard. “Let’s meet in two hours, then I’ll check the moisture again,” Mick said.

Jiichan nodded. He usually walked with perfect posture, but now his shoulders slumped. I held on to his hand as we walked to our room. Obaachan and Jiichan immediately got into bed, so Jaz and I unloaded the pickup. We’d brought bottles of water, two thermoses of coffee, and one suitcase apiece. We weren’t expecting to be here very long.

It seemed as if I had just fallen asleep when I heard knocking. I staggered sleepily to the door. When I opened up, Mick stood there looking exhausted, looking, in fact, a lot like my family.

“The wheat’s ready,” he said. “Mr. Franklin called. He’s waiting at the farmhouse for us.” He held up a thermos. “I don’t know how Americans drink so much coffee. Awful stuff, but it does wake a man up.”

“Do you want to wait in here?” I asked him. “We’ll just be a few minutes.”

“I’ll wait outside.”

Obaachan was already up and dressed in fresh clothes. She was the Incredible Sleepless Woman. She was listening to music on an MP3 player. She liked Bruce Springsteen. Go figure. It was pretty funny when she cried out lyrics like “Take a knife and cut this pain from my heart!” She took one of the thermoses and filled the cap with coffee. “Tosh,” she said. “Sorry, very sorry, but you have work now.”

Jiichan opened his eyes but didn’t move. He finally sat up. “This worst moment of my life,” he said before getting out of bed. I felt so bad for him. We had all gone to sleep fully dressed. He went to use the bathroom before walking out without changing. Obaachan and I followed him. She would need to take the pickup back and forth from the motel to the big rig as she alternately went to the elevator and relaxed in the motel. I let Thunder stay in the motel because I didn’t want any trouble.

Several acres’ length away, we approached a farmhouse. There was a man sitting on the porch, a shotgun on his lap. The only reason to have a shotgun was to hunt, and I was pretty sure he wasn’t doing any hunting, sitting on the porch. Obaachan waited in the pickup.

The man stood up. “Parker Harvesting?”

“We are,” Mick said. He put out his hand. “I be Mick. This be Toshiro.”

“I never seen a Chinese wheatie before,” the farmer said, eyeing Jiichan.

“Japanese,” I piped up extra politely when Jiichan or Mick didn’t correct him. I don’t know why, but I felt like I had to use my best manners with people who didn’t deal with many Asians. I felt like I was representing the whole Asian race. The farmer looked at me closely and didn’t move his gaze. “You just stuck your finger into an electric socket?” he said. I remembered my hair. Then he smiled. I smiled back.

“You Irish?” he said to Mick.

“I am.”

“Seen those before. We had two from South Africa last year.”

“Did ya, then?” Mick said.

The farmer checked his watch. “You’re sure it’s ready?”

“I am.”

“You’re looking a little ragged. Hope you have enough energy to do this job.”

“We do,” Mick said.

Jiichan came to life. “We hard worker.”

“Well, have at it. I got almost fifteen hundred acres here, and it’s supposed to rain this weekend. It’s gonna be close. I figure you’re each gonna have to cut close to twenty acres an hour.”

“We’ll be getting started, then,” Mick said.

The farmer returned to his seat. I could feel his eyes on us as we headed back to the pickup. They felt like heat on my back. Farmers could be very intense people during harvest.

“What did he have a gun for?” I asked when we were out of hearing distance.

“Many crazy people in America. I don’t know why,” Jiichan answered.

I waved to Obaachan and she drove off. “You don’t know why there are so many crazy people in America, or you don’t know why he had a gun?” I asked. “Oh, no! I forgot my DEET.” I felt for a moment that I couldn’t breathe.

“Go back to motel,” Jiichan told me.

“Will someone drive me back there in the big rig?” I implored. “Please? I want to ride with Jiichan.”

Mick appraised me with a harsh face. We were all already perspiring. I wiped my arm across my face and then wiped my arm on my shorts.

“Ya’re going to have to walk. We’re on a deadline,” Mick replied.

I really disliked that man, even if he was right.

I scanned the farm. The field sloped gently on the south side. It looked like windblown sand beneath the bright sky.

I had to decide whether I should ride with Jiichan or walk back to the motel to get my DEET. Jiichan climbed up the combine, and I followed. “Are you sure you can do this?” I asked him.

He stared straight ahead, his lips pressed together. “I hard worker.”

“I know you are, but you’re sick.”

Instead of replying, he pushed the key into the ignition and blew the horn twice, which you were always supposed to do before you moved a combine, to warn anyone standing around to get out of the way.

The passenger seat was really uncomfortable, so I folded my legs on the chair. The Parkers made sure every combine had a flashlight, a banana for potassium, and a bottle of water at all times. I held the banana up to Jiichan, and he shook his head. He turned on the air-conditioning and closed his eyes as the cold air washed over us.

Every time I’d ever climbed into a combine, I felt small. It was like riding on a small house. Jiichan honked the horn twice again. The machine was trembling. He pulled to the side of where Mick had already begun cutting. He had left us a strip of uncut wheat at the edge of the field.

When I turned back to Jiichan, he was pushing the throttle lever to five miles an hour. I thought about Robbie. If he liked that Laskey girl better than me, then that was the way it was. But why did he have to say what he said the way he said it? Then my mind wandered back to mosquitoes. They’d been around for thirty million years. I had read once that supposedly if you put all the ants in the world together, they would weigh more than all the humans in the world. I wondered if that was also true of mosquitoes. My father said that was the problem with me—I wondered too much and filled my head with nonsense about mosquitoes. He thought that was because having malaria hurt not only my body but also my mind, and it might take a long time for my mind to heal. If I didn’t meditate, maybe my mind would never heal, Jiichan had added.

I remembered again how my dog Shika had known she was about to die. When I had malaria, I could think, but it was like I was thinking with a different brain than my normal brain. And then something happened—the medicine defeated the parasites, I guess. So I didn’t die. And then when I was completely well, I was a different kid—a kid who knew I could die. Before that, I never thought about dying at all.

I looked up and saw that Mick was driving by our side. I waved at him, but he didn’t wave back.

“Funny feeling,” Jiichan said out of the blue.

“What?”

“Funny feeling,” he said again. I waited for an explanation, but none came. Then a minute later he put the combine into idle. He seemed to be deep in thought.

“I may need break,” he said.

For a second I didn’t know if he meant “break” or “brake.”

“Feeling funny.”

“What do you need?” I asked, suddenly alert.

“I just need to sit and think.”

The radio came to life. “Everything all right, then?” Mick asked.

Jiichan picked up the speaker. “Everything fine. I just thinking.”

“Thinking, ya said?”

“Yes, I need thinking.”

Mick didn’t reply, and Jiichan engaged the combine again. We hit a patch of weeds. I could smell them being cut up and shot out the back, and I could hear the combine grumble as the weeds went through the machinery.

I looked at Jiichan’s gloomy face. He was a happy man. I had rarely seen him so gloomy. It made me want to cry. Jiichan seemed to be weighing his options. But he didn’t speak again.