The Thing About Luck

CHAPTER FOUR

From our home in Littlefield, Kansas, we had to drive across the state to Susanville, Kansas, to meet up with the Parker Harvesting crew. My parents had worked for the Parkers twice, once two years ago and once three years ago. The second time we were short on money, and they paid us for the first month before we’d done any work. That’s the kind of people they are.

It was still dark when we set out in our rattly, old Ford pickup. That thing was older than I was. We’d eaten a quick breakfast of oatmeal and two umeboshi each. I just pulled on a pair of jeans. I was also slathered in controlled-release DEET. That was why Thunder didn’t lay his head on my lap like he usually did. The company that made the DEET said they used an extra refining process that almost eliminated the smell. I’d grown used to it, but it was apparently too much for Thunder.

Jiichan sort of turned off whenever he drove. He didn’t talk much and kept the radio on low. Once in a while he came to life, as if somebody had flipped an “on” switch. As for Jaz, he was blowing giant bubble-gum bubbles, over and over. “Look,” he said. “I can blow a bubble the exact same size every time.”

On his lap sat a LEGO apartment building he’d been gluing together as he built it. He could have just put it in the truck bed, but he said that it was his most precious possession. End of argument.

Thunder was curled up on the backseat beside me. I opened my window. The air was perfectly lukewarm, but I knew when we got to Texas, that would change. When I checked the Weather Channel before we left, it said it might hit 100 degrees there! Thunder lifted his head and took a big breath, closing his eyes and, I swear, smiling. I stared out the window. The wheat fields were black in the early-morning darkness. I wondered who’d be cutting those. Maybe it would be us as we swung back north.

We drove past mile after mile of wheat, soybean, cattle, and sunflower farms. One of my favorite things was driving through Kansas when both the wild and cultivated sunflowers were in bloom. I liked the wild ones better, the clouds hovering over the tangle of yellow. They would still be in bloom in the fall.

Then I heard Obaachan growling. It was her sign that the pain in her back had become unbearable. Without a word, Jiichan pulled over to the side of the road. He had barely stopped the truck when Obaachan got out and lay flat on her back on the shoulder of the highway. She lay down like that several times a day, sometimes for hours. Jiichan grabbed the flashlight from the glove compartment, and we all stepped outside. Thunder sniffed at Obaachan and then looked at me, as if he knew something about her that he couldn’t communicate to us.

We stood around for twenty minutes or so doing nothing but watching. That kind of standing around occurred sometimes in the country, where you were far from medical care. You had to kind of gather around and evaluate. Obaachan looked bad, but I’d seen her worse. She even wore a slight smile, as if she was thinking of something pleasant like me getting all A’s or Jaz finding a friend. She had just recently stopped dyeing her hair jet-black, so I could see the white roots like a halo around her face.

Then her smile faded and she said, “We suppose to be there before six.”

She reached out her arms without saying anything more, and Jaz and I each took a hand and pulled her up.

Back in the car she said, “I think I die this year, maybe this month.”

“I die first,” Jiichan replied. “Japanese women live to nineties.”

“I die first! You eat many mandarin orange as child. They make you live longer. Vitamin C.”

“You drink more green tea. You live longer.”

They continued like this for several minutes, at the end of which I wasn’t sure who the matter was settled in favor of. Personally, I planned to live until I was 103, like my great-grandmother on my father’s side had. All she did toward the end was watch TV, like it was more important than the real people around her. But there was a lot of good stuff on TV, so it wasn’t such a terrible last few years.

We drove quietly, except for Jaz, who popped his perfect bubbles over and over. For some reason, that started to make me crazy. “Can you stop popping your gum so much, please?” I asked him politely.

“Make me.”

“You are so immature!”

He gave me a hard, angry look, and then I was already unbuckling my seat belt as he started pounding the side of his head on his window, his LEGO building tottering on his lap. I wrapped my arms around him and squeezed, so he wouldn’t hurt himself. I had learned that when you’re trying to hold someone still, you had to concentrate on squeezing, just as you had to concentrate when you did math or English. If you tried to do it with just your strength and not your mind, you would fail. In fact, Jiichan taught me to meditate partly because he thought that would help my concentration whenever I had to hold Jaz back.

After a couple of minutes he calmed down. Jiichan had pulled over, and he and Obaachan were watching. Jiichan said sadly, “You lucky to have each other. Why fight?”

“All I did was say he was immature,” I said. “Alyssa says that all the time to her brother.”

“You’re not even human!” Jaz cried out. “You’re nothing but a smelly DEET bomb! Smellface!”

I set him loose and moved back to look out my window. I wasn’t going to talk to him for the rest of the ride. Let’s see him get malaria and not come out the other end feeling a little paranoid.

“You grounded, Summer,” Obaachan said. I didn’t answer, but she continued. “You start fight.”

I took a big breath. I supposed she was right, but nobody ever thought about how hard it was for me to have Jaz for a brother.

At last we reached the Parkers’ house. Jiichan opened the car door, said, “I die first” to Obaachan, and got out, slamming the door.

The sun hung above the horizon, a red ball like on the Japanese flag. That’s what the sunrise always made me think of. Uh-oh! The sunrise today was after six! We were late. I hoped we weren’t in trouble already.

The Parkers owned a good chunk of land. A whole acre was devoted just to their machines. I saw four combines that I knew they rented; four big rigs (semis) they owned; two camper trailers, one much bigger than the other; a tractor and grain cart; four grain trailers; four pickups; and a variety of trailers to load some of the equipment on. I knew a lot about those machines. The combines were hulking, bright green John Deeres; that’s what most harvesters used. The cabs had two seats, and the windows stretched from floor to roof. You drove on the right side instead of the left for some reason.

Combine harvesters are kind of magical machines. This is what happens during harvest: When the wheat is ripe and ready to cut, the combines drive in an orderly fashion, up and down through the wheat fields. In the front of the combine is a detachable apparatus called a header. The header cuts the crop as the combine moves forward. Then the insides of the combine separate the edible wheat from the inedible chaff and then send the wheat into a bin on the back of the combine. The chaff drops to the ground, where it stays to help fertilize the soil for next year.

I don’t know. I mean, maybe computers and cell phones and rocket ships are more magical, but to me, nothing beats the combine. That’s just the way I see things. In a short time, the combine takes something humans can’t use and then turns it into something that can feed us.

So. The bins hold about 275 bushels of wheat. At the usual speed of five miles per hour, a combine can cut six hundred or so bushels of wheat in an hour. There are a lot of variables, and I could be wrong because I’m so bad at math, but, taking some average numbers, six hundred bushels is more than twenty thousand loaves of bread.

To get the wheat grains out of the bin, the combine has an auger, which is a long, hollow, pipelike contraption that pushes the wheat from one end of the auger to the other. The auger moves the wheat from the bin to a grain cart.

A grain cart is attached to a tractor that pulls it up and down the fields. Neither the tractor nor the combine stops moving as the combine driver dumps wheat from the bin to the cart. Not stopping saves time, which is so, so important to harvesting—the grain has to be cut when it’s just right.

Stick with me; I’m almost done explaining what happens in the field! The grain cart holds a thousand bushels. When it gets full, the tractor is driven to one of the grain trailers attached to the waiting big rigs, and its auger is used to dump the wheat from the cart into the trailer. When the trailer is full, the big rig takes the wheat to an elevator, where the grain is stored until the farmer sells it.

I learned all this when I was seven and went on my first harvest. You know how there are some people who just love little kids and will take the time to explain anything to them? And then of course there are people who love their kids, but pretty much ignore every other kid. Well, that year my parents and grandparents worked for a couple who loved kids—all kids. So they let Jaz and me ride with anyone we wanted, whenever we wanted. Jaz still talks about that couple sometimes, because they treated him like he was a normal kid, which is kind of unusual. Sometimes I can look into the eyes of a grown-up and see the moment they realize Jaz is different. I still remember that I never saw that in these people’s eyes.

Wait, where was I? Oh yeah. So, the grain elevators use systems of augers to move the wheat into the silos. If rain was coming, the process would continue until the early hours of the morning, so that all the farmers could get their wheat in before the rain. Some elevators were even open 24/7.

That’s one job I would never want: operating an elevator. Sometimes employees would slip from ladders or walkways and end up suffocating beneath tons of grain. Also, the grain dust in the air could ignite easily. Before I was born, an elevator in Kansas exploded and killed seven people. Another time, six more people died in an elevator explosion. Scary!

Jiichan told me that Mr. and Mrs. Parker had started out as combine drivers, then saved enough to qualify for a loan to buy their first big rig. Now they could afford to hire people like my family to drive the combines and trucks. If you were a custom harvester, you were the boss; but if you were a combine driver, you only worked for a custom harvester and didn’t get paid much. My parents hoped to become custom harvesters one day too. They would start out with one semi, or two if the bank would give them a big enough loan.

Like us, the Parkers lived in farm country in a white A-frame house. But their house was a lot bigger.

The front door of the main house was wide open. Thunder sniffed at the doorway. Jiichan tried knocking, but no one answered, so he knocked harder. Obaachan said, “Summer, you call hello. You talk best.”

She always said that.

“Hello?” I called out. “Hellloo!” Nobody answered, but we could hear voices from inside. “Let’s just go in,” I told my grandparents.

“Oh, no,” Jiichan said. “Not polite.”

“Never go inside if nobody let you in,” Obaachan agreed.

“Then we’re just going to have to wait here,” I said. “But the door’s open. That means we can go inside. I’m sure it’s okay.”

“No, not okay,” Jiichan said, shaking his head.

“Helloooooo!” Jaz suddenly shrieked.

There was an abrupt silence from inside, and then Mr. and Mrs. Parker came to the door. “Toshiro, Yukiko, come in. You don’t have to knock!” Mrs. Parker said.

So we took off our shoes and entered. We were wearing running shoes that were identical except for being different sizes. The Parkers’ house was pretty inside. A wedding-ring quilt, all in shades of pale blues and yellows and pinks, hung on the wall facing the front door. A quilt was one of two things I had always wanted. The other thing was a wicker chair for the front porch. “What kind of girl wants a wicker chair?” my mother had asked when I’d told her that. I knew why she said that. I mean, the other girls at school coveted smartphones. I would rather have had a wicker chair. Melody thought I was nuts.

I loved the Parkers. They had one son, Robbie, but he was kind of boring. I guess I would play cards with him if I were desperate, but he wasn’t interesting like his parents. Mrs. Parker was all business a lot of the time, but she was very kind, and if anyone got hurt, she was all over them like a Band-Aid. She was a large woman with a strong, caring face, the sort of face that made you like her right away because she was nice, but you knew you couldn’t take advantage of her.

“Summer, you must have grown three inches,” she exclaimed, giving me a hug.

“Yes,” I said politely. “I think it’s been exactly three inches since you last saw me.”

Mrs. Parker’s hair was dark reddish, and she had the greenest eyes I’d ever seen. And Mr. Parker reminded me of the president or something—a man who chose to have the weight of the world on him.

“Great, you’re here,” Mr. Parker said, clapping his hands together once. “We were just talking through our plan for the north part of harvest. Since we have only a thousand acres in South Dakota, we can split up there. Some of us can go on to North Dakota.”

I thought it was pretty nice of them not to mention that we were at least half an hour late. Everyone else was ready to go. It was weird because my grandparents were always saying it was important to be punctual, and they were always rushing around to be on time, but they were almost always late. Sometimes they would start getting ready for something before my parents started, and they would still be late. In fact, the only time I could remember them being on time for anything was for Jaz’s meeting-party. They had really wanted that day to be a success.

We followed the Parkers into the kitchen, which was crowded with all the workers they’d hired. In the middle of the room was an island surrounded by stools with green cushions that said JOHN DEERE on them. John Deere made stools?

“Lonny, it’s a little more than a thousand acres in South Dakota, and there’s a chance of finding more,” Mrs. Parker gently argued, getting back to the discussion our arrival had interrupted. “So can’t we just plan not to have a plan?”

“I guess that’s the same plan we have every year,” Mr. Parker said, and everybody laughed.

I couldn’t wait to get to the Badlands. I’d been there on two different harvesting trips. In the Badlands you could see rocks of every color and shape. One time, over unending cliffs of gray rocks, we saw a cloud-and-fog storm approaching, as if it were aiming right for us. I had never been so scared or so excited. We didn’t want to get caught in the fog because then we might have to stay put until we could safely return to our car—What if we walked off a cliff in the fog?

And yet we couldn’t leave—it was if the rocks were holding us there. I mean, they were only rocks. But for some reason, those rocks made lonely feel good. Those clouds made you dream big. Not big like you could make a lot of money or like you could have a good job. Bigger than those things. It was complicated. I mean, big like you were part of the sky, which also made you feel small. I don’t know how to explain it! The last time I had been there, we’d seen tan rocks shaped like the hides of some sort of animal. Nobody will ever convince me that those rocks weren’t as alive as I was. They were just on a different timetable.

“Have some coffee, and then we should get going,” Mrs. Parker said to my grandparents. I pulled my mind away from the rocks as Mrs. Parker began to gesture toward the workers one at a time. “This is Sean Murphy, Rory O’Brien, and Mick Ryan. They’re from Ireland. And this is Bill McCoy and Larry Dark. They’re American. Folks”—now she was pointing at us—“Toshiro and Yukiko Sakata and their grandkids, Summer and Jaz.”

Many custom harvesters hired non-Americans. The Parkers hired their foreign employees legally through an agricultural program at Ohio State University. The employees got paid by the month, regardless of whether they worked sixteen-hour days or hardly any hours because of rain—it was impossible to harvest during a rain because combines can’t thresh wheat if it’s too moist. Since the hours could be really long, and you had to live for months at a time in a camper, the custom harvesters found that foreign employees were more likely to stick with the job than Americans.

This is how nice the Parkers are: At the end of every season they always take the employees on a special trip, like to a big city or to a NASCAR race. We went to NASCAR with them once, and I have to say that sitting for hours in the sun and watching a bunch of cars speed by me was about the most upside-down day of my life. I mean, everyone—even Jiichan—got all excited when there was an accident right in front of us. If you were a nice person, such as my father and Jiichan and the other workers, why would an accident excite you? It was like all the rules about driving that applied in the outside world didn’t apply at NASCAR. Then a bunch of men who worked for NASCAR helped the driver out of his car, and blood dripped down his forhead. He wasn’t hurt badly, but still, it was totally bizarre how excited everyone was. My dad said I just didn’t understand men and cars, and what they meant to one another, and I said, “Amen to that,” and my mom laughed out loud—she always says that.

Anyway, the two Americans were older, probably retirement age, like my grandparents. The Irish guys looked like they were in their twenties. Irish workers always used the word “lads,” but I thought of them as “guys.” “Lads” just didn’t sound right. All the men wore jeans and T-shirts with writing or pictures on them. Mr. Dark’s shirt said KEEP AMERICA FOR THE AMERICANS, and Rory’s said THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST, which was an Iron Maiden record from way back in the early eighties. Some guys at school were obsessed with that music. My grandparents didn’t believe in such T-shirts, because why should you pay to advertise for someone else? I had tried to explain to them that you could use T-shirts to express yourself. Jiichan had shaken his head and said woefully, “No can be different by doing same thing as everyone else.”

“Will youse two be driving combines, then?” Mick asked. The Irish guys from our last harvest did the same thing—used “ya” for “you” in the singular and “youse” for “you” in the plural. Isn’t that cool?

“I drive, she cook,” Jiichan said. “She best cook in country.”

I tried to figure out who’d be doing what—four semi drivers, three combine drivers, one tractor driver. But that left an extra combine. The logistics always made my head spin. And then there was Obaachan and we three kids (including Robbie). What I could figure out is that Obaachan and I would be cooking for twelve every day. Yikes!

We all headed outside, and Mr. Parker gave us our driving assignments.

I think it went as follows: We’d leave our Ford at the Parkers’, and Obaachan would drive one of the Parkers’ pickups, which was attached to the smaller camper—the camper the Parkers would be living in. Jaz, Thunder, and I would ride with her. The pickup would also be the service car we would drive for the whole harvest, used to shop for groceries or to make a parts run if any of the machinery broke. Jiichan was driving a semi, which was hauling the tractor and grain cart. The three Irish drivers were each driving a semi, each hauling one combine and one grain trailer for an extra-long load. Mr. Dark and Mr. McCoy would each drive a pickup hauling a combine header. The final vehicle was a pickup, which Mr. Parker would drive hauling a third header. Mrs. Parker and Robbie would ride in that pickup.

We were leaving behind one combine, one grain trailer, the employee camper, and one header ... I think. I wasn’t sure I could keep track of it all at that point. When we reached Texas, the majority of us would start working immediately while three of us would drive back with two semis and a pickup to get the rest of the machinery. By law, the last combine wouldn’t be hauled down to Texas until daybreak. Transporting such wide loads was dangerous at night because of overhang into the oncoming traffic.

As everyone made their way to their assigned vehicles, Robbie Parker sauntered out of the house with his hands in his pockets. I had not seen him for two years. He was fourteen now, I thought, and had turned so good-looking that I gaped and was really glad that I’d neatly braided my hair that morning. I only stopped gaping because my grandmother pushed me so hard that I lost my balance.

I helped Obaachan pack some of our essentials in the pickup we’d be driving, but we transferred the rest of our luggage to the employee camper, which would be driven out to us on the second trip. The only special things I brought into the pickup for myself were a spray bottle of DEET and my lifetime savings of $461, which included the special twenty-dollar bill my grandfather had given me when I was five years old. I could still remember him telling me, “Someday this bill may be worth a million dollar. It called inflation.”

Once everyone else was packed up and settled in, Mr. Parker pecked Mrs. Parker on the cheek and said, “Let’s roll, beautiful.”