Ride the Lightning (27 page)

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.

udger, as you might have noticed, is a guy plagued by so much hard luck that he should have his own astrological sign. Fate often twists the knife in him. When he drops his toast it always lands jelly side down, and often on the toe of his shoe. When he attempts to toss his only coin into the basket at a toll booth, he not only misses, but the coin invariably rolls beneath his car. His girlfriend occasionally sees his romantic rival on the advice of her analyst, and also turns out to be suicidal, an ongoing kind of problem.

But some of this misfortune is of his own making. After all, he did drop his toast, miss the toll booth basket, and choose to become involved with his lady love despite the scars on her wrists. Like all of the rest of us, hard luck peo
ple do manufacture at least some of their own misfortune. We are like history, doomed to imitate if not repeat ourselves.

In
Ride the Lightning
, I attempted to illustrate and examine this common human characteristic. For this a client was needed who had even worse luck in life than Nudger—say, a fella waiting to be executed for a crime he didn’t commit. And his naive lover who is sure that Nudger can somehow save him from death at the hands of the state.

At the time this novel was written, the gas chamber and occasionally the electric chair were still in use where Nudger lives and works. Now lethal injection is the method of involuntary demise. Whatever the reader thinks about capital punishment, this is at least something like progress. Maybe not enough, but progress. A little research will persuade that death in the electric chair is a particularly horrible thing to contemplate, especially if the condemned happens to be innocent of the crime.

I didn’t want this novel to read like a political tract on capital punishment, and I hope it doesn’t. It is simply about something that happens to some people under their respective clouds of misfortune. Of course, like Nudger, they to some degree create their clouds. Not much good can blossom out of robbery and murder. Not for the victims, the perpetrators, or for Nudger as he lurches through the case chomping antacid tablets and, like his client, paying a price for leaning too much.

Sadder but wiser—is that a fair trade?

A
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