Night Moves

I was always a little too tall for the room. Big frame, bad posture. Pants fit like I borrowed them off a mannequin — tight in all the wrong places. Saggy at the ass. I never made much of a splash, except for the noise I made when I walked into things. The kind of guy who disappears in daylight but gets noticed under a flickering streetlamp. By the cops.

She was different.

Walked in like smoke curling through a keyhole. Black hair that spilled like India ink and eyes so dark they should have been locked away under the Official Secrets Act. Pinned to a snow-white beaverboard.

That summer, the cornfields bowed under the weight of the sun. Beyond them, where the woods thickened into something holy, I had a ’60 Chevy with a backseat that swayed like her body to the smoky beat of the night. It became our hideout, our confessional booth. We weren’t chasing answers — hell, we didn’t even know the questions. We were just ... working on mysteries without any clues.

Working on our night moves. A little drive-in theatre drama for nobody’s front page.

It was the sweet season — the kind where the nights come soft and heavy. You don’t fall in love during a summer like that — you fall into it, face-first and eyes closed. But we weren’t even pretending. Love wasn’t the thing. Not for her. Not for me. We weren’t dreamers — we were drifters with a mutual itch. Young, bored and reckless. Living by the blade, bleeding slowly.

We’d sneak off every chance we could — backrooms behind shuttered gas stations, alleys no one dared walk after dark or that same patch of woods behind the cornfield where the old gold Chevy waited, a place of my own. There were no hearts broken because there were no hearts offered. I used her. She used me. We called it even.

No regrets, Coyote. Getting our share.

We worked on our night moves like a mechanic works on a junker — elbow-deep, half-hopeful, half-lost. Trying to shed the awkward skin of teenage blues.

There was lightning once — that kind you feel in your bones before you see it. The air got tight, like it knew something we didn’t. And we sat, side by side in the Chevy, waiting for the thunder. Waiting for the crash that never came.

Last night, I woke to the sound of it — thunder rolling out across the distance like some half-forgotten promise. I sat up, wondering how far away it was. Wondering what else was still out there in the dark, just out of reach.

Started humming a song from 1962. Ain’t it funny how the night moves when you don’t seem to have as much to lose? Strange how the night moves. With autumn closing in.