I Knew These People - Ry Cooder.mp3

[00:02.10]Man : I knew these people, these two people.
[00:11.87]They were in love with each other.
[00:16.95]The girl was very young, about 17 or 18 I guess
[00:24.66]and the guy was quite a bit older.
[00:29.85]He was kind of rugged and wild.
[00:34.18]And she was very beautiful , you know.
[00:38.85]And together they turned everything into a kind of an adventure.
[00:44.38]And she liked that.
[00:47.36]Just an ordinary trip down the grocery store was full of adventure.
[00:54.93]They were always laughing at stupid things.
[00:58.21]He liked making laugh and they didn’t much care for anything else
[01:07.89]because all they wanted to do was be with each other.
[01:13.36]They were always together and he,
[01:17.54]he loved her more than he ever felt possible.
[01:25.60]He couldn’t stand being away from her (ah)
[01:29.29]during the day when he went to work.
[01:35.76]So he’d quit just to be home with her.
[01:42.47]Then he got another job when the money ran out.
[01:46.85]And then he quit again.
[01:49.55]But pretty soon she started to worry.
[01:56.82]Woman : About what?
[01:57.96]Man : Money I guess. Not having enough.
[02:01.30]Not knowing when the next cheque was coming in.
[02:06.02]Woman : Yea. I know that feeling.
[02:08.95]Man : So he started to get kind of torn inside.
[02:17.41]Woman: How do you mean?
[02:19.90]Man: Well he knew he had to work to support her,
[02:22.98]but he couldn’t stand being away from her either.
[02:27.81]Woman : Lassie!
[02:29.60]Man : And the more he was away from her ,the crazier he got.
[02:34.28]Except now he got really crazy.
[02:40.85]He started imagining all kinds of things.
[02:44.93]Woman: Like what?
[02:48.56]Man: He started thinking that she was seeing other men on the sly.
[02:54.14]He’d come home from work
[02:55.18]and accuse her of spending the day with somebody else.
[02:59.66]He’d yell at her and break things in the trailer.
[03:05.74]Woman : The trailer…….
[03:09.58]Man: Yes, they’d lived in a trailer home.
[03:17.88]Anyway, he started to drink real bad
[03:22.32]and he’d stay out late to test her to see if she’d get jealous.
[03:28.79]He wanted her to get jealous.
[03:30.93]But she didn’t.
[03:32.53]She just worried about him.
[03:35.01]But that got him even madder.
[03:37.40]He thought if she’d never be jealous of him
[03:38.85]that she didn’t really care about him.
[03:42.03]Jealousy was a sign of her love for him.
[03:46.46]And then one night, one night she told him that
[03:50.79]she was pregnant.
[03:53.23]She was about three or four months pregnant.
[03:56.11]And he didn’t even know.
[03:58.51]And then suddenly everything changed.
[04:01.75]He stopped drinking, got a steady job.
[04:05.78]He was convinced that she loved him now
[04:07.52]because she was carrying his child
[04:10.91]and he was going to dedicate himself to making a home for her.
[04:15.98]But the funny thing started to happen.
[04:18.62]He didn’t even know to set it first.
[04:21.11]She started to change.
[04:23.99]But the day the baby was born
[04:25.74]she began to get irritated with everything around her.
[04:28.72]She got mad at everything.
[04:31.66]Even the baby seemed to be an injustice to her.
[04:35.29]He kept trying to make everything all right for her.
[04:38.24]Buy her things, take her out to dinner once a week.
[04:42.62]But nothing seemed to satisfy her.
[04:45.60]About two years he struggled to pull them back together
[04:49.34]like they were when they first met.
[04:52.58]But finally he knew that it was never gonna work out.
[04:58.55]So he hit the bottle again.
[05:00.84]But this time it got mean.
[05:04.03]This time when he came out late at night,
[05:06.51]she wasn’t worried about him, nor jealous.
[05:09.95]She was just enraged.
[05:13.83]She accused him of holding her captive by making her have a baby.
[05:20.21]She told him that she dreamed about escaping.
[05:23.30]That was all she dreamed about: escape.
[05:27.24]She saw herself at night running naked down a highway;
[05:31.12]running across fields;
[05:33.31]running down river beds;
[05:35.40]always running and always just when she was about to get away,
[05:39.93]he’d be there.
[05:41.92]He would stop her somehow.
[05:45.25]He would just appear and stop her.
[05:50.73]And when she told him these dreams, he believed them.
[05:55.31]He knew she had to be stopped when she’d leave him forever.
[05:59.34]So he tied a cow bell to her ankle
[06:02.03]so he could hear at night if she tried to get out of bed.
[06:06.01]But she learnt how to muffle the bell by stuffing her sock into it
[06:10.09]and inching her way out of the bed and into the night.
[06:16.17]He caught her one night when the sock fell out
[06:18.35]and he heard her trying to run off the highway.
[06:20.84]Caught her and dragged her back to the trailer
[06:23.33]and tied her to the stool with his belt.
[06:28.56]He just left her there,
[06:30.45]went back to bed and lay there listening to her scream.
[06:37.22]Then hae listened to his son scream and he was surprised at himself
[06:42.89]because he didn’t feel anything anymore.
[06:48.56]All he wanted to do was sleep.
[06:53.79]For the first time he wished he were far away,
[07:01.71]lost in the deep,
[07:03.00]vast country where nobody knew him.
[07:06.49]Somewhere without language or streets.
[07:12.06]And he dreamed about this place without knowing its name.
[07:16.29]And when he woke up he was on fire.
[07:20.27]There were blue flames burning the sheets of his bed,
[07:26.49]and he ran through the flames toward the only two people he loved.
[07:32.92]But they were gone. His arms were burning
[07:39.39]and he threw himself outside and rolled on the wet ground.
[07:48.00]Then he ran.
[07:51.24]He never looked back at the fire.
[07:56.29]He just ran.
[08:04.32]He ran until the sun came up and he couldn’t run any further.
[08:12.63]And when the sun went down, he ran again.
[08:22.98]For five days he ran like this
[08:27.61]until every sign of man had disappeared.