Dark Angel was the song he dedicated to Susie.

She blew him a kiss. It was like he could see it rise above the smoke and neon and glide lazily toward the stage, a rose petal in the evening breeze. Momentarily he stopped strumming, reached up and caught it.

DOWN THE ROAD A PIECE BY BERNIE HAFELI 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 11

The pedal steel guitar whined like someone with a week-old toothache, drifted listlessly out the window and died of exposure in the damp summer heat. It came courtesy of WCNT, all Grand Old Opry all the grand old time, a station Mapes never strayed from. A woman was pumping gas. She was pretty, somewhere in her late 20s, dressed in shorts, and a T-shirt that asked, “Am I hi?” The words made a bow over a cartoon of a bullfrog about to jump a motorcycle off a cliff. Sunglasses perched atop the woman’s straw-colored hair like an unspoken dare. She seemed intent on stopping the meter exactly at some round number. Apparently she missed, because she yanked the nozzle out of the tank with such force that it got away fr…