Ride the Lightning (Alo Nudger)

by John Lutz

  Nudger believed him. Hammersmith was, in the narrow range of his profession, as skilled and wily a politician as Scott Scalla. He could fade and feint with departmental bureaucracy, with the media, and with the Board of Police Commissioners, about whom Hammersmith knew more than they suspected.

  Hammersmith got one of his horrendous cigars from his shirt pocket and lit it with a book match. “Wife won't let me smoke these in the house,” he said.

  “She probably doesn't want green drapes.”

  “By the way,” Hammersmith said, “I got myself a good lawyer. Charles Siberling.”

  Nudger thought about Siberling fiercely chewing and spitting his way through the police-department legal process. He smiled. Hammersmith would indeed be okay. “Siberling's a good choice,” he said. “You're hardly playing fair with the department.”

  Hammersmith beamed around his cigar, his blue eyes piercing through the putrid haze. “Boy, he's a slippery little bastard,” he said in admiration. “Just like a goddamned barracuda with a briefcase. What a future he has.”

  “Pneumonia will be in my future,” Nudger said, “if I don't get in out of this cold.” The fog of his breath rose before his face.

  Nudger had never seen Hammersmith do what he did then; he snubbed out a cigar half-smoked. “Come on into the house, Nudge. We'll have a few beers and bitch about the world in general.”

  An hour later, reassured about Hammersmith and sated by a ham sandwich and two Budweisers, Nudger returned to his apartment.

  In his mail was his voter-registration confirmation, informing him of the date of the next election and the location of his polling place. The state was asking for a sales-tax increase to help fund highway maintenance. The bill's opponents claimed that the additional tax money actually would free other state money, which would be used to pay some of Scott Scalla's campaign obligations. “Money for pockets instead of potholes,” their literature stated. The state-paid TV spot that was played repeatedly was a scene in which a young family's station wagon hit a pothole, flew out of control, and burst into flames. Only the father, who'd been driving, survived, though not very happily. It was a gloomy situation anyone born of woman would vote to prevent.

  The bill was expected to pass by a wide margin.

  Nudger tossed the registration card and campaign literature into the wastebasket and decided not to vote.

  Then he walked to the living room window, stood staring out at the murky, snow-pregnant winter sky, and changed his mind. That was what people like Scott Scalla relied on, people like Nudger not voting. Nudger would vote this time, and he'd keep on voting.

  Maybe someday it would make a difference.

  Maybe Charles Siberling would run for governor.

  34

  Nudger lay with Claudia in the morning light in her bedroom. He was on his back, beneath the blanket and sheet, while she lay on top of the covers, still breathing deeply. Everything had become good between them again, Nudger thought, though not as good as it had been before their newly defined relationship. He wasn't sure if Claudia was seeing other men. He never asked, fearful of the answer.

  She sighed, propped herself up on one elbow, then swiveled to sit on the edge of the mattress. Nudger watched her with the familiar awe. Her lean body was breathtaking in the soft light. Half an hour ago his groin had ached for her, and now it was his heart. A compartmentalization the women's liberation movement would frown upon with unplucked brows. Maybe they were right; sometimes Nudger felt as extinct as one of those dinosaurs with two brains, each of which provided disastrously poor judgment.

  Claudia stood up and turned to look down at him. “I don't see how you can bear to stay beneath those covers,” she said. “The radiator keeps it at two thousand degrees in here.”

  “I'm cold,” he told her. “Cold's a subjective thing, even at two thousand degrees.”

  She shook her head, and he watched her walk away, into the bathroom. Some walk.

  The shower hissed and gurgled for a while, then Claudia returned, still toweling herself dry. There were goose bumps on her arms and thighs, and her flesh was reddened where she'd rubbed too hard with the rough towel.

  As she began to dress, she asked, “How's Hammersmith doing?” She'd always liked Hammersmith, and she knew how what had happened worked on him.

  “Things have returned to his idea of normal,” Nudger said.

  “He must know some important people.”

  “Better yet, he knows about some important people.”

  The Board of Police Commissioners, after an appropriate length of time, had exonerated Hammersmith. They had become so incensed at Siberling that they suggested it was the judicial system that had been at fault in the Colt conviction and execution. Siberling blamed police procedures, politics, the sun, the moon, and the stars, everything and everyone other than Hammersmith. The buck that had stopped at Hammersmith had been broken down into small change that no one cared about.

  The problem was—as with Claudia and Nudger—things would never be quite the same for Hammersmith. That's what life seemed to come down to, losing some small part of yourself here, another there, inching toward icy darkness.

  Claudia was standing hipshot in her Levi's, buttoning a white cotton blouse. Nudger liked her best when she dressed plainly to set off her subtle beauty. Simply looking at her gave him a sensation of contentment and wholeness. He needed her more than he'd planned. So much more. He thought about Candy Ann and Curtis Colt, and wondered if love was a trap for everyone. His and Claudia's lives wouldn't go on forever; was it any wonder he was selfish about her? Okay, more than selfish. Downright greedy and possessive.

  “Why don't we get away this weekend?” he suggested. “Drive somewhere and find blissful isolation? Maybe rent a cabin.”

  She missed a button. “I can't. I've got plans for this weekend.”

  “The entire weekend?”

  She nodded, turned away from him, and began brushing her hair. Their eyes met in the dresser mirror. She looked away.

  “With someone of my gender?” Nudger asked.

  “Yes.”

  Nudger's heart suddenly weighed so much he didn't think he could budge. Claudia's image in the mirror seemed to recede, change, as if he were watching her through wavering, distorting glass.

  “I really don't understand how you can stay beneath that sheet and blanket,” she said, “as hot as it is. You must be crazy.”

  He listened to the sighing, faintly crackling strains of the brush passing through her long hair. It was almost like the sound of sizzling, high-voltage current, of dwindling time.

  “Not crazy,” Nudger said, “cold. Colder than before.”

  But he threw back the covers and struggled out of bed into his world.

  Some people you couldn't crush.