All World Cowboy Romance

Alex Egervary

Just once, I’d like to get in a fight. I’m sitting in my second floor window looking out over my town. It’s raining right now – some drops stick to the screen on the other side of the pane of glass. The town drops off below me. In the rain, it looks posterized. Behind the span of roofs, I can just barely see to the other side of the valley. Gray hills against a gray sky. Now the rain is stopping.

I go walking after the rain, down the hills here into town. It’s summertime and the weather gets warm quickly. The rain turns to steam in the road and evaporates quickly. I make it to the movie theater in twenty minutes of quick walking and buy tickets for the John Ford movie playing. There’s a Western film festival going on at the theater (The Excelsior) that I’ve been attending the last two days. I get in the theater and hear thunder from outside, either the storm came around again or I’m just hearing echoes from somewhere else, on the other side of the valley.

The movie ends two hours later and I walk out into the dim light of dusk. The theater’s marquee is lit, vaguely illuminating the eleven or twelve sidewalk squares around the queue. The wind still blows hard even though the storm seems completely gone. It’s not raining at all but the air is still humid. It’s a night that I’m sure you can imagine. The air is warm and moist but the wind is dry and strong and blows a piece of cardboard across the street as I exit the theater. The audience disperses, most towards cars parked here and across the street, since there’s little public transportation here. I turn towards the side of the valley opposite from my house and start walking.

I grew up in this town, and almost twenty years later I haven’t moved far. When I come home from college for breaks, I feel like I haven’t left at all. Like the town is in stasis while I’m gone, then I return and revert to the same kid I was before I left. I rode out in an eleven year old Volvo and I rode back in the same Volvo, now thirteen years young. The windows slid down and I cranked the sunroof open, I played whatever CD I was listening to as loud as I could but by the time I pulled into the driveway I was sixteen and going out for the first time on my new license. The first car I drove was the first car I wrecked, pulling straight out into an intersection under a red light. The truck crossing the street was right in front of me – white and shiny, new, the black sedan I was driving dusty with the back roads I drove when I couldn’t sleep. I went east to Hazelton, took the sharp turn onto I-76 and drove until I didn’t know where I was. When I started to get worried, I turned around, front wheels sliding off the shoulder to the ditch at the side of the road, branches scratching at the window shield, headlights shining into a generic span of forest that could’ve been located anywhere along the spine of the Appalachians. I started driving in the other direction, as aimless as I had been before. I ignored highway signs and turned instinctively, losing myself again on a spiraling road that followed the curve of a mountain overlooking a lake on this side and another valley on that. I don’t think it was my valley but I stopped in the middle of the curving roadway anyway, staring down at the faint lights of downtown and the well-lit freeway describing a concave curve around the eastern (I think) side of the town. I kept driving up the mountain to the lookout at the peak, where I used the parking lot to turn around and drive down the mountain again. I turned over the tape I was listening to (side A was Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazelwood, side B was White Light/White Heat, I had just finished listening to Sister Ray so next was Nancy & Lee doing You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling) and went driving. I got home late, so I turned off my lights and idled up our street until I reached our driveway. The backseat and trunk were full of boxes and plastic bags, books and records, t-shirts and my computer. I was listening to a tape I found in the backseat when I was packing the car. It had the Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazelwood album on one side, and the Velvet Underground album White Light/White Heat on the other. It took three times through the tape to get home. I got into town with the windows down and the sunroof open, like I said before, with Sister Ray pouring out the tinny speakers, but twenty minutes later I pulled up my driveway. It was later than I had hoped, and the sun had almost set. My parents had probably already started dinner, so I closed the windows and sunroof and turned the volume down. Sister Ray wound down as I parked. I turned off the ignition and went inside.

The Volvo was in the shop now. A week or so ago, I hit a curb driving to the record store and tore a hole in one of my tires. The wheel blew out and I lost control. I was playing that same tape again, since it was in my car. Side B track one – Lou Reed yowling about speed and I sing along (“white light makin’ you insane”) and don’t notice my big gray boat slowly go off course to the right where her wheel collides with the curb. The pop was nearly drowned out by the tape-distorted feedback and distortion coming out of my car speakers, but I heard it and spun around like I was looking for a gun. The tire blew out and my car went off balance, I grabbed onto the wheel and slammed on the brakes and hit the lamppost sitting up on the same curb. The car came to a stop six or seven inches over the ground, held up by the now broken lamppost and I sat back hard in my seat. The tape was still running, changing over to The Gift when I punched the eject button hard and cursed.

So I was walking down Union the wrong way instead of driving. The film that night had been The Searchers, of course. It’s probably my favorite western film, that or Rio Bravo.