Thunder Road.

August 11th, 2010 § 1 Comment

By Bruce Springsteen and Ernest Bazanye

I nudged the Camry off the road and purred slowly up the clay. I stopped before the gate and turned down the radio and waited. For a while, the chirruping and the whooshing and the faraway cracks and shrieks of a suburban kampalan evening resolved themselves into a distant hum, and the only sound was the bare whisper of Roy Orbinson in the cassette player, singing for the lonely; this is stillness, which sometimes is as good as silence. and it was as he strummed that I heard her screen door slam.

Mary stood on the veranda, suddenly, abruptly present, altering the keel of the whole universe. When she saw me waiting in the car, she did a little dance, striking a little pose to show of the dress.

The moment of frivolity passed and she must have been struck by the thought that we should be hurrying, because she stopped fooling around on the porch and started to skip up to the car. I had never seen Mary skip before. She was a strong woman, tough as she had to be, and she usually moved with the resolute firmness of a hammer. But then she usually wore trousers. The dress was a moment of fancy, perhaps, a what-the-hell-let’s-see, a wink and a nod, a little prank to play on our daily lives, but as I watched the light fabric play around her knees, I couldn’t help but understand exactly what the dress said, and the joke was not funny. It was solemn and staid and it was on us.

The dresses of this fashion; we had first seen a dress like it in a magazine in a shop in Naalya. A smiling blonde extraterrestrial woman from Utopia was wearing it as she swooned into the arms of a perfect Aryan with broad shoulders and a grin made of pure light. We used the page to wrap our chips and chicken.

Now, as the folds swayed around her knees, the scars on her knees (and the long one on her inner left thigh) flashed like sparks and she had to reach down to stem the cloth’s reckless motion.

A new garment, a new gait, the beginning of a new journey. But the same old scars still came with us, the accumulation of all the bitter shit life had done to her, she could not leave behind.

Mary was no Utopian blonde, and I was certainly no broad-shouldered Aryan. I wish I was, but I wasn’t. I couldn’t fly her off to the stars in a shiny spaceship. All I had was this Camry and the promise to take her as far as it would let me go.

She swung the door open with too much energy, slid in and slammed it again the way I kept telling her not to and beamed as if there was never ever going to be anything to worry about ever again. I just got scared. “We’re a bit late,” I said. “We can make it if we hurry,” she said.

I turned the key. The Camry flexed, then chugged and growled. I shifted the gears and we were curling back down the murram hill looking for the road.

I wanted to tell her that this was going to work, that we would hit the city limits and fly down Thunder Road and ride all night and by daybreak we would be where things worked out and everything started out alright and stayed that way and promises were made of steel and nothing could break them, and I know she wanted to hear me say that. But those were words I couldn’t speak. I had already said too many things to her that I should never have said.

Evening breezes threw up dusty clouds; all the boys who had loved her and lost her, their wasted desires turned to ghosts that turned to dust to watch us and bid a forlorn farewell. We said nothing. Roy Orbinson strummed on. Mary’s hand straightened her dress and lay on my shoulder for a moment. Her eyes looked out of the windows at the town whizzing past us. Until we got to the city limits. The sign welcoming those coming here, and the sign saying “come again” to those leaving. I stopped in the middle of the road and sighed. The sun was weak , but I could still see the road stretching before us like a killer in the night.

“I know it’s late,” said Mary, sensing what gripped my heart, “but we can make it.”