The Higher Power of Lucky

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.”