The Lightning Rule Read Free Page B

comfortable as the chair was, Emmett couldn’t get comfortable in it.
    “This is a great show. I love this show,” Edward said, clapping in drunken encouragement when an episode of Gunsmoke climaxed with a barroom brawl. He lit a cigarette, finished the dregs of his beer, and lazily set the empty can beside his half-eaten meal. The beer can toppled to the floor. “Oops.”
    Emmett picked it up. “Are you finished with your food? You barely ate.”
    “I’m watching my figure. All this beer goes right to my hips.”
    Edward would goad him into an argument if he could. Emmett wouldn’t let him. “Your hips or your bladder? Do you need to…you know?”
    “Naw,” Edward waved him off. “I’m getting the hang of it.”
    His wheelchair was tough to maneuver through the house’s narrow doorways, especially the bathroom. If Edward didn’t align the chair accurately, he would smash his fingers between the wheels and the jamb. He had special gloves to prevent his palms from getting blistered, which he never wore, and a special seat that went over the toilet, which he was training himself to use. He had been home for a month. It seemed like more since Emmett cleared the dining room and moved Edward’s bed and dresser down from the room they shared as kids. Edward couldn’t get in or out of bed without help and he couldn’t feel if he wet the sheets. Emmett had to change them every morning.
    The nightly news came on, reporting troop movements and knitting in old footage from the anti-Vietnam march in Central Park. Hippies burnt draft cards in the foreground while police in riot gear stood in a rigid phalanx behind them. Edward let out an exaggerated sigh, as if the news was a rerun he had already seen. He had enlisted following his layoff from Westinghouse nine months earlier. Their father also worked at the plant and had the good fortune to die of a heart attack well in advance of the factory shutting its doors and moving to the suburbs, led away by tax cuts and lower wages. Had he been around, the closing would surely have killed him. A machinist, he cut parts for toasters and dryers for two decades, coming home with flat feet, a bad back, and a paycheck that couldn’t cover college tuition for one son, let alone both.
    “What else is on?”
    That was Emmett’s cue to get up and change the channel. He spun the TV dial until Edward said stop at an episode of The Andy Griffith Show. The warbling whistle of the theme song was inappropriately cheerful considering the heat.
    “Beggars can’t be choosers,” Edward said.
    It was a sentiment, one of a scarce few, upon which Emmett and his brother could agree. In a city that had seen its share of prosperity dwindle with each company that fled for cheaper pastures, with every ounce of water the breweries siphoned from the polluted Passaic—water the tanneries had poisoned to begin with—and with every tenement that crumbled under the weight of its owner’s disinterest, there were more beggars and fewer choices in Newark than ever. Emmett hadn’t been to mass in ages, but he was confident they still passed the collection plate. Begging wasn’t a sin. Wanting choices might as well have been. Becoming a cop was Emmett’s second choice. The decision to relinquish his first was a splinter in his conscience, forced deeper each time he looked at his brother.
    Edward eventually fell asleep in his wheelchair, and Emmett dozed off too. He later woke to the telephone ringing. Light from the television was flickering across Edward’s face. His cigarette smoldered in the aluminum TV dinner tray. Emmett snubbed it out and picked up the phone.
    “Detective Emmett?”
    The desk sergeant’s raspy voice was unmistakable. As a rookie, a drunk rousted from an American Legion bar had come at him with a screwdriver and nicked his larynx. The battle scar earned him respect that stuck through the ranks. On the force, reputations spoke louder than words or actions, and often outlived