Pink Flamingos

Thunder Road

If I can find a publisher in the next two years, I thought to myself as I walked out of the trailer park gates, I can really make something of myself. Writing is the only thing I’m good at and if that falls through, I have nothing – no other talents or interests, besides daydreaming. So, it’s essential that I-

“Hey Speed, wait up!” I heard a familiar voice behind me yell.

I stopped with an annoyed sigh. “Or,” I turned around, “you could just walk faster.”

I had never seen Eddie move so quickly. Everything he had done in our short time together had been lazy and languid. But for some reason, he was running after me.

“God,” he panted when he caught up, “you’re a fast f*****g walker, sweetheart.”

“My name is Nancy. It seems like you always forget.”

All I could wonder was what he possibly wanted from me. Each day when I had walked out of my trailer, he stared at me blatantly, unashamedly. It wasn’t threatening but it was certainly something. I couldn’t ignore him.

He grabbed me by the wrist gently, stopping us both in the middle of an almost empty street. I glanced down at his hand, his large fingers wrapped around me, then back up at his face. His eyes trailed up my arm, following the shape of my shoulder, my collarbones, my neck, and finally my face.

His jaw tightened. I wondered if I was seeing nervousness for the first time. “You…have soft wrists,” he said quietly. “Can I ask you something?”

Quickly, I nodded, my heart racing.

Eddie frowned slightly, his eyes meeting mine. “Where do you go every day?”

The question hung heavily in the air. The whole world seemed to be frozen still as I tried to figure out what to say. Did I have to confess already? I didn’t care for his approval, that I already knew. But I didn’t feel a need to speak to him either. A wind blew around us softly, as though it didn’t want to interrupt the conversation.

“I’m just curious,” he said, probably realizing that I was uncomfortable.

I sighed. “I…. I walk to the edge of town.”

He tilted his head to the side, silently examining and questioning me. My skin crawled under his gaze. Still, I continued.

“I don’t really like it here,” I began cautiously. “I want to go to Vegas. I won’t like it there either, but I still want to go. So, I’ve been walking to the city limits every day.”

To my disgust, he started laughing at me, high-pitched chuckling. I frowned, pulling my wrist out of his grasp and stepping back defensively. He stopped, but I couldn’t wipe the f*****g smile of his face.

After taking a moment out of my busy schedule to glare at him, I turned my back and continued on my way. I should have known, I thought, I always should have known.

“Wait, wait, hold up sweetheart!” He was walking quickly beside me. Much to my relief, he wasn’t laughing or smiling, only glancing at me with what I so desperately wanted to be a look of apology. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“You didn’t offend me,” I said, “you annoyed me. I told you something that’s important to me, and you laughed at me – you annoy me.”

“Let me make it up to you then.” He caught my hand again, stopping me.

I sniffed. “I really don’t see how.”

He didn’t reply, but he didn’t let go of my hand either. Instead, he kept walking with me unwillingly in tow. There didn’t seem to be any sheepishness on his part at the situation, but I couldn’t see his face. I heard him mumbling to himself occasionally.

My heart was racing. The irrational side of my mind was whispering to me, though it was steadily getting louder and louder, that something very, very bad was about to happen. It wasn’t as if Mama Heather had never warned me that I “shouldn’t go off with strange boys, you never know what they want from you”. But then again, she did keep telling me to be neighborly. And he was the boy who lived across the road, not an old man trying to drag me into an alley.

Together, we walked familiar roads. We walked past the grocery store, then past the candy store, towards a series of shops that I had not yet taken the time to explore properly. He wouldn’t turn to face me. I still didn’t have the free use of both my hands.

Eventually, without a second glance, he asked, “Why do you want to go to Las Vegas?”

“Because it’s adventurous and daring.”

“Are you adventurous and daring?”

“I’ve always wanted to be.”

Eddie turned and raised his eyebrows at me, our hands still connected.

“Are you?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Depends on who you ask. You been to the record store yet, sweetheart?”

I shook my head.

That, he decided, was where he would take me. Wordlessly, I was dragged into another quiet, air-conditioned neon store. The only difference was that, for once, it was actually nice to have company.

Every inch of the store was crammed with records – there were neatly arranged shelves with little title cards of what genre they were, but then there were also haphazardly stacked piles all over the floor. The man behind the counter was asleep. He didn’t wake up, even after Eddie shouted, “Hello!”

“So, this is where you buy everything that allows you to annoy me all day every day?”

“Don’t be harsh. What kind of music do you like?”

“I don’t have a record player,” I said flatly.

That didn’t faze him. “What kind of music do you like?”

“A bit of everything really…. Yeah, a bit of everything. Jazz is cool…” Nervously, I began to ramble. I quietly told him that I liked Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holliday, but that I also liked the Beach Boys and the Shangri-Las and that I thought rock ‘n’ roll was really cool. He didn’t interrupt – he only nodded occasionally, his eyes staring straight into mine. I tried to avoid his gaze, but there were only so many times I could glance at the floor or the ceiling before I found myself staring straight back at him again.

He didn’t say anything. I swallowed nervously. “I’d ask you what kind of music you like,” I said, “but I think I’ve heard it all anyway.”

We wondered around the store together, sharing in each other’s company without speaking. Eddie was almost methodical about it – he examined every shelf, every pile, carefully and precisely, as though he was looking for something very particular, though he told me he had nothing on his mind at all.

Occasionally, I would feel him staring straight at me. I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye, unsure of whether he was noticing or not. There was something about his presence. It was almost too much to simply be silent in a room with him – through no fault of my own, I was so acutely aware of even his smallest movements.

It felt like my skin was burning whenever he looked at me. All the hair on my arms was raised. I could feel goosebumps popping up on the back of my neck.

From across a pile of records, he looked up at me. “You wanna be adventurous and daring, don’t you?”

Nervously, I shrugged. “I want to be a lot of things, it doesn’t mean anything is going to come of it.”

“If you were really ‘adventurous and daring’, you’d go to Las Vegas anyway. You wouldn’t just hang around at the city limits.”

“You don’t think I don’t know that already?” I replied, trying to act as though I was extremely fascinated by the Led Zeppelin record in front of me instead of looking at Eddie.

“Why don’t you then?”

In the heavy silence, I tried to take deep breaths. The idea of revealing anything real about myself made my chest hurt. Him laughing at me and my hopes only moments ago didn’t exactly make me more eager to open up either – I knew that he didn’t mean anything by it, but I meant so much by everything. Every small reaction destroyed me. I had long since decided that an acute awareness of humanity was going to kill me, or send me mad, or both.

“Fear,” I said quietly to him, half hoping that he wouldn’t hear me. “I want to do things, but everything is too much and I’m scared.”

To my surprise, he didn’t laugh. “How are you ever going to have an adventure if you’re scared?” Eddie asked me. He didn’t sound amused, he didn’t even sound like he pitied me – he just sounded a little sad.

I shrugged a little. “Even grand adventurers get scared too sometimes.”

Curiously, I picked up a Bruce Springsteen record. I could feel Eddie eyeing me. “This is the new one, I think,” I said to him, “Born To Run.”

“You want it?” He raised his eyebrows.

“I don’t have a record player.”

“But sweetheart,” he replied, gently taking the record from me, “I do.”

With a frown, I followed him through the store, navigating stacks of records to reach the cash register. He placed the record down proudly with a few crumpled notes on top of it. I wanted to thank him; instead, I swallowed thickly, wordlessly watching him.

He seemed kind, but the question kept echoing in my head, bouncing off every corner of my mind – What does he want? What does he want? What does he want?

I followed him back to the trailer park slowly, still unable to form a sentence. The words I needed were so simple; I could thank him, or I could ask him why he did it. After all, he didn’t need to buy me anything, no matter how cheap it was – I certainly didn’t want to owe him anything. But I couldn’t make the words come out, my mouth was sealed tight.

So, we walked in silence, seemingly both lost in our own worlds. My only contribution was staring at the back of his head and wondering what the hell was going on. I wondered if he was feeling the same way as me, or thinking the same things – if he had so much to say to me but he felt that all the words were still, dead and pointless.

He stopped me at the entrance of the trailer. “Wait here,” he said quietly, quickly darting inside. When he returned, he returned with a spare fold-out chair, just like he had the other day when I bought him the cherry pie. He set it out besides his own and motioned at me to sit down.

Silently, I watched him set up his record player. He handled everything so gently, I almost admired him for it. He slid the record out of its dust cover as though it was an act of love, and placed the needle on so carefully, like he was putting the final touches on a house of cards, worried that it may break and collapse at any moment.

“This first one is called Thunder Road,” he told me as he sat down beside me. “You know, I don’t even like Bruce Springsteen.”

“I do, and you’ve got bad taste. If you don’t like him, why are we listening to him?”

“You just answered that for me,” he replied. I was about to say something else when he shushed me. “He’s about to start singing. I wanna get my money’s worth, let’s just listen.”

Together, we sat and listened to Springsteen’s serenades under the hot afternoon sun. Sometimes I would hear him singing lyrics that he picked up as the record went along under his breath. “You’re not a beauty, but, hey, you’re alright,” from Thunder Road made him laugh. He stared straight at me when he wasn’t gazing off into space.

Eventually, Eddie rested his head on my shoulder with a loud sigh. I couldn’t help but stiffen; he chuckled under his breath. I wasn’t sure whether to push him off me or put my arm around him. Every part of my mind and body was frozen solid underneath the weight of him.

I took a deep breath, knowing that he would feel it. “What are you doing?” I asked softly, not daring to move a muscle.

“Getting comfortable,” he said. “You can lean on me too if you want, I don’t mind.”

Cautiously, I rested my head on top of his, trying to seem natural and relaxed, as though it was something I did every day. His hand wondered to my knee, and he later ended up with his fingers intertwined with mine, long after the record had stopped playing. We spent the entire afternoon together, just stuck like that – not stranger, not friends, certainly not anything more.

I guess he just has a strange way of getting to know the neighbors, I thought to myself. Or maybe I’m the one who’s strange.