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John Lutz

Ride the lightning

I

A slanted sheet of rain swept like a scythe across Placid Grove Trailer Park. For an instant, an intricate web of lightning illuminated the park. The rows of mobile homes loomed square and still and pale against the night, reminding Nudger of tombs with awnings and TV antennas. He hadn't been back long from a trip to New Orleans, where, because of the swampy soil, the dead are interred above- ground. That was how the trailer park seemed at that moment in the storm, with no sign of anyone outside the mobile homes. Only here the dead had cars parked nearby, and occasionally one of the entombed could be seen moving behind a draped window.

Nudger shivered, and held his black umbrella at a sharp angle against the wind as he walked. He slipped a hand into his pocket and pulled out a scrap of paper. Squinting fiercely, tilting his head to the side to catch faint light off the paper, he double-checked the address he was trying to find in the maze of trailers. Though the night was warm, the rain was oddly cold and seemed to find its way down the back of his neck no matter how he held his umbrella. He stuffed the water-spotted paper back into his pocket and walked on, trailing a wing-tip shoe through a deep puddle and cursing softly.

Finally, at the end of Tranquillity Lane, he found number 307 and knocked on its metal door.

He didn't have long to wait. There was a light on inside the trailer; he saw someone's shadow cross a drawn shade, moving toward the door. The wind shot some more rain his way and threatened to snatch the umbrella away from him and play roughly with it. He felt the wet plastic handle rotate powerfully in his grip and squeezed it tighter, edging in closer to the trailer for shelter.

"I'm Nudger," he said, when the door opened.

For several seconds the woman in the doorway stood staring out at him, rain blowing in beneath the trailer's small metal awning to spot her cornflower-colored dress and ruffle her straw-blond hair. She was tall but very thin, fragile-looking, and appeared at first glance to be about twelve years old. Nudger's second glance revealed her to be in her mid-twenties.

She had slight crow's feet at the corners of her pale blue eyes when she winced as a raindrop struck her face, a knowing cast to her oversized, full-lipped mouth with its slightly buck teeth. There was no one who could look much like her, no middle ground with her; men would consider her scrawny and homely, or they would see her as uniquely sensuous. Nudger liked coltish girl-women; he catalogued her as attractive.

"Whoee!" she said at last, as if seeing Nudger for the first time as she'd stepped out to check the weather. "Ain't it raining something terrible?"

"It is," Nudger agreed. "And on me. "

Her entire thin body gave a quick, nervous kind of jerk as she smiled apologetically. "I'm Candy Ann Adams, Mr. Nudger. And you are getting wet, all right. Come on in. "

She moved aside and Nudger stepped up into the trailer. He expected it to be surprisingly spacious; he'd once lived in and had his office in a trailer and remembered it as such. But this one was cramped and confining. The furniture was cheap and its upholstery threadbare. A portable black-and- white TV on a tiny table near the Scotch-plaid sofa was blaring shouts of ecstasy emitted by "Let's Make a Deal" contestants. It was hot in here, and the air was thick with the smell of something greasy that had been fried too long.