Gossip is a cruel mistress. Here’s Dalton, jauntily strutting into the Double Deuce for another night’s work at what has become the ideal bar. He knows his pal Wade Garrett is on the way (though of that day and hour knoweth no man). He’s just had a night of romance with Dr. Elizabeth Clay. Here he thinks he’s just sitting down for the usual chit-chat with Cody. But Cody keeps his ears to the ground in addition to those white-hot blues licks, and he feels obligated to inform his friend that Brad Wesley had a thing for the Doc once upon a time too.
Here’s how he puts it: “As I hear it, she left town and he went nuts. Heh. Small town, huh, Dalton? ‘Course, that’s just the word.” Hitchcock himself couldn’t have conceived of a crueler and more confounding open ending than that final sentence. Now instead of clearing things up for his pal, Cody has muddied them further. How can he discover for certain what the truth is?
Well, by asking Elizabeth directly, that’s how. Knowing Dalton, that’s something he’s unlikely to do. He keeps himself buttoned up, allowing others in when necessary and desirable, keeping other problems at arms’ length unless and until they make themselves impossible to ignore. A man like that would go right on ignoring his girlfriend’s failed marriage to his nemesis unless pushed—pushed, perhaps, by a friend who phrases his revelation of this information in a deliberately ambiguous way, so as to force his buddy’s hand and force him to address uncomfortable truths rather than letting them fester. A good friend, in other words.
Fortunately for Dalton, Wesley almost immediately starts attempting to kill all of his friends and associates, so the motion is tabled. There’ll be time enough for rehashing the past after a bunch of old men shoot Brad Wesley to death.
Tags: brad wesley, cody, dalton, dr. elizabeth clay, jeff healey, road house, the double deuce