Dust Bowl

The romance deepens and begins to rot in the same breath. Against a parched, drive-in Americana of cheap slasher flicks and inherited damage, the boy comes into focus. Natural blond, holes in his sneakers, eyes always on Ethel while all of Alabama lies ignored in front of him. He is tender and doomed, raised on a father’s leftover war, the writer he might have been already burned out of him before he could start.

Ethel knows it is love the night she rides home crying, picturing him with other girls. She knows it more surely when he says it back and finds, for once, that she does not need to ask if he is sure. The whole song glows on the surface with the ruin showing plainly through, a first real love, bright and certain and already drying out, consumed, as the outro has it, by death.