Staying Alive
December 28th, 2007The oil covering the fresh black asphalt had an iridescent spangle. Johnny Ditmar, 22, walked along the shoulder kicking the dirt and gravel up over the blacktop of the highway.
Over the weekend someone came and unrolled a long gooey roll of road on top of the old one. Ground up asphalt rocks gooed together with sticky tar. It seemed too clean, too black. The melted marshmallow warning band seemed too perfect. He stepped up on the pavement to inspect the stripe, tapping at it with his boot to see if it was still wet.
Friday that same road was paled and cracked by heat, brittled with age. But the familiar potholes had vanished.
The scarred and worn leather of his boots, covered in the dust of the miles, seemed out of place on the pavement. The road was as clean as his mother’s living room. She would have been pissed.
He peered out to the valley below.
Both sides of the highway were lined with brand new billboards. No buildings in sight, just the dark asphalt separating green soybean fields with patches of even greener trees. He wondered about all those billboards. There wasn’t exactly a lot of traffic rolling down that road. It wasn’t exactly a metropolis in this part of Alabama. He counted a dozen billboards, all blank and bright white framed in shiny aluminum extrusion.
Only one board had a printed face. “You could wake up with a different identity tomorrow. Be safe. Get the facts at bekomex.com.”
A yellow car popped up over the crest of the hill and approached. An old yellow Datsun, but it wasn’t a rust bucket. Black curly hair fluttering through the top of the sunroof. The driver looked dark, must be a black girl. Johnny barely caught a glimpse of her as she whooshed by.
Time to move on. Got to get to work. Johnny cranked up the volume on his WALKMAN and strutted up the hill toward the horizon. “Stayin’ Alive”, by the Bee Gees, filled his headphones. Old Sennheiser headphones he inherited from his father’s failed music career. The headphones were as big as the kind used by air traffic controllers, so large that his coworkers at the bread factory teased him.
But they still sounded good.
They were free.
Johnny yelled out the lyrics. Nobody was around to be bothered. He could not sing; the noise he made on the highway was unmusical. It felt good to scream at the top of his lungs.
