From that point on, it was once again a landlord at the center of the driver’s now grown-up scorn. It wasn’t only that he raised the rent upon a whim, and refused to even supply the materials with which the couple could fix up the cottage that he owned. It was, above all that, the way the landlord leered at Paula; so overtly that the driver could see what he was thinking, written as it were on his sick grin. There were also the few obscenities he would address to Paula –in a low, slithering whisper- when he managed to work up the nerve and when the driver was sure to be at the ranch.

That’s why the driver would have suspected him right away when he found Paula like that, splayed on the concrete steps leading up to their box of a home, if he hadn’t known better. Lucky for the landlord, the most probable suspect was already known to be out of prison and on the prowl.

“Probable”, that is, to the driver and his fiancé. As far as the police would have been concerned, all signs would have pointed back to the landlord, assuming the driver could have accounted for his whereabouts for the entirety of his midnight break at the ranch. He can hear the detective’s incredulous chortle now, “An’ tell me, I s’pose you never drove the eight miles back home durn’ yer breaks?”

The driver feels a hatred rise up in his chest that can only thinly disguise itself as heartburn. A cheer sweeps over the crowd gathered beneath the tree. The mayor –or whoever he may be- must finally be drawing his speech to a close.

Even with a town center bustling with people, there hangs over the scene an odd stillness. Perhaps it is wrong to call it loneliness. It affects residents and visitors alike with a vague sense of unease. Unlike the blunt sting of emptiness –like the whiff of rotting coyote among the desert’s abandoned shacks- Barstow exudes a more subtle stench.

The driver enters the square at the back of a procession. Through the half-opened window, on the heels of muffled revelry, wafts a longing for something that may never have been, but is missing all the same. He can see it on the official’s face as he grows closer and almost chokes on self-laudation. It’s phoniness, and everyone is taking in their share. The driver is reminded of yet another reason to dislike Christmas.

The father soon adopted a very convincing imitation of the loathsome man. Except his drink was the poor imitation of Southern moonshine procured from other, displaced Southerners working the factories, while the boss-man’s drink was hard-to-come-by, and therefore very expensive, Scotch. The two would have it out, incoherently, at all hours of the Friday night and into Saturday morning. They seemed to grow closer for it. Meanwhile, the young boy’s contempt grew with no bounds, until it was purified and reduced to a burning hatred reserved for the single entity the two men had become.

The driver can now recognize the object of scorn as authority, or at least, instances of its most brazen and self-righteous display. How could he know that deep down, he hates these men of authority not for what they stand for –after all, they come as bearers of so many different institutions- but for what they refuse him?

With his father, it was withheld love; while he hated the boss for seemingly keeping his father from him, or for turning him into someone impossible to be around. Growing up, it was respect that he craved. Now, the driver has lost Paula. Can he really expect that hunting down the man who took everything from him will be enough to bring it all back?

The driver’s gaze falls from the man on the podium to the flushed faces of families gathered below. They return the speaker’s animated gestures with the sodden stillness of an audience enrapt. Cherub cheeks of children appear equally aglow, but they must be reacting viscerally. There is no way they can take the speaker’s words to heart, as their parents so obviously have; but children have a way of getting beyond words, and can understand adults on a more profound, unspoken level. They know a parent is sad, angry, hurt -before they have a chance to recognize any of the telltale words, or even groans, of emotion. The driver has seen it before in his niece and nephew and it never fails to terrify him. The idea of parenthood itself terrifies him.

Part of the reason he and Paula had moved to California was to start a family of their own; after officially tying the knot, of course. They agreed to their modest clapboard bungalow at first sight. It’s not that they instantly fell in love with the place. It obviously needed much repair if it were to house them, and eventually a firstborn, for any amount of time; but they had just arrived with a pickup piled with their belongings and the rent would be manageable, though it was more than the driver imagined paying for a dilapidated one-room box.

The two had officially been together for five Christmases, but this one would have been their first out on their own in California. In that sense, it was to be more than a mere celebration of some Jew carpenter’s birth long ago. It would have been a celebration of them, their longevity, and their forging a new life with no precedent to guide them.

The driver has no way of knowing this, but Paula died coming home from answering a ‘for sale’ ad in the paper. She put away enough of her paycheck –she worked as a laundress- every week for a year so she could buy him a new motorcycle for this Christmas. He found her with three cents left in her purse.

Atop the podium in the square stands an officious-looking speaker, no doubt making grand proclamations about the blessedness of this town and hopes for good fortune in the upcomming year. All the driver can make out is the boom of amplified but unclear words, and the overwrought gestures of a man basking in the esteem -dare he thinks admiration?- in which he believes himself to be held.

An unconscious recognition automatically brings up a very palatable hate in the driver, to the point where it usurps the buffet of fear, sadness, and loneliness on which he had previously been snacking. The remains of these hearty appetizers leave a faint afterglow in his mouth. A hateful mouthful, like wine, comes to wash them out. He knows this man, in a guttural kind of recognition. This recognition causes him to smile, all the while gritting his teeth. Of course, he doesn’t know him by name or by face. He knows, or has known, others of the same pompous caricature: starting with early childhood and leading all the way up to the present day.

His first memories of Michigan began with such a man: his father’s boss, who also happened to be their landlord. He was a red-faced, incomprehensible man whose only mode of communication was the dying end of a hoarse shout. The man drank, yelled, and soon forgot what he was worked up about, so that he would have to start from the beginning, except more belligerent and out of breath.

Barstow is deserted and dark until he comes to the center of town. Compared to the dazzling mirage of the metal works, the low cottages and brick corner-stores on the approach into Barstow appear as shadows of a former city. There is an odd lantern or porch light, but the driver is overwhelmed by the darkness of the residential neighborhoods on the outskirts.

“It’s deader-ere than at’n the desert.” This observation is made with no amusement.

The pickup is alone for most of the approach into downtown. The steady groan of its engine echoes back off the perfectly even sidewalks. Since this is a main thoroughfare, there are light poles with hanging flower baskets and banners pronouncing various civic achievements and -since it is close to Christmas- a few wreaths thrown in for good measure. Barstow is far from a ghost town, but Saturday nights bring out the loneliness unique to desert towns, big and small.

The clapboard buildings of the main street –called Cayuga Boulevard- grow to three and four stories, with awnings overhanging the sidewalk, and residences above. There are signs of life, with the silhouettes of small groups of people collected on corners or browsing past the closed shops.

Ahead is a square. It breathes with people, gathered around a giant conifer rising from its center. It is hard to make out the various decorations and lights adorning the tree. They are overpowered by the bustle of a marquee and the bright windows of shops and a restaurant. From its top, towering over the surrounding masonry of roofs and coming up short only to a church steeple, shines the star of Bethlehem. It now guides different travelers through a different desert in a different time. Its affect upon the driver is wholly different as well. Instead of brining hope or serving as a heavenly guide, it swamps the driver with a type of sadness he has never experienced before, because it is so overlade with fear. A drop of sweat races down the side of his brow to join the taught wires of his neck.

He had forgotten that it is only a few weeks until Christmas. Of course, he and Paula had planned a little celebration, perhaps a roast turkey with all the trimmings and a bottle of sparkling wine. Christmas had been a more tortured affair when he was growing up. Technically, it could hardly have been considered a proper Christmas, unless the addition of eggnog mix to his father’s –he ceased to be Pa long before- repertoire of homemade alcohol is to be any indication of the holiday season. Paula claimed not to be able to remember hers, even up to the point when she disappeared to Detroit for two years, starting when she was fifteen.

The driver hits the brakes, swerves through the oncoming lane and straight into the opposite shoulder. The pickup hits the earthen bunker lining the road and lurches up in a belch of dirt. The ditch doesn’t stop the car completely, but slows it down a good deal. The driver has to swerve again to avoid the works’ chain-link perimeter fence.

The pickup idles there for a while, its bumper just feet from a metal post in the fence. A little further down the road, backed three-quarters across the two-lane highway, the driver spies the behemoth flatbed that almost ended his life. It is packed with more steel than it looks like its eight-foot high wheels can bear. The metal of the pipes doesn’t have the finished sheen to which most are accustomed, but a gritty, burnt tarnish like the underside of a frying pan.

The driver can only hear the roar of a diesel engine, but he imagines the tires’ groan against the tread-marked asphalt. They roll back slowly, beneath blinking warning lights. He has to smile, “Guess them warin lights wern’ bright enough.”

The driver brings his forehead down to the steering wheel, unable to decide if he has just gotten lucky or been robbed of fate. Either way, he laughs and it feels good. The breathless laughter causes him to take in great gulps of the sulfur-infused air. It burns his insides, cuts his lungs, and brings to mind a saying he’s told himself countless times but whose origins he probably never knew: “There’s na such thing as an acc’dent.”

It’s one of those sayings that one goes through life reciting as a reflex, especially in those situations where words don’t seem to otherwise come so easily. Only now does the driver reflect on his motto, usually reserved for commentary on the inexplicable. He knows he should be relieved, now that his journey can continue. It dawns on him, however, like a revelation of the irrelevant: this journey –taken for revenge, for her, for them- can only have one ending. Less ambitious still: all the driver can hope for is an end.

With this thought, of a very grave comfort, the driver forces the gear shaft into drive. The pickup squeezes by the behemoth truck, in the little space left for it between the overhanging pipes –draped with a bright red warning flag, some good!- and the fence. He is escorted into town by a long blast of horn that shakes the windshield and his bowels: same as the one that had caught him off guard and off the road.

Barstow

There are buildings in the purple distance, barely discernible in a faint moonlight. Their nondescript squat roofs render them similar to all the other ranch huts that have dotted the desert since Bakersfield. They are almost beyond mentioning, but they continue to outgrow the proportions typical of a horse stable. In a second glance, they appear back-lit by an unearthly glow. Their silhouettes are rendered in a foggy orange. The driver speeds closer, the buildings grow larger.

He is close enough now to make out the words –or for him, the familiar partial-boxes of what appear to be words- on a sign fixed atop one of the buildings: “Ranchero Granada Metal Works”. One of those English-Spanish hybrids, evident of Spain’s once-ownership of the land, it might as well be German for all the driver can tell.

“Ranch! Ah’v never seen a ranch lit up like this. How do th’horses git ta sleep a’night?!”

The corrugated metal walls of the warehouses –out of place on any ranch- continue to expand in length and height, and they look as if they will come right out onto the road and block the driver’s way. A yellow, weathered sign is briefly caught in his high beams. It reads, “Caution- Slow Moving Vehicles Ahead”.

The entire works is lit up like day. At the point where the giant warehouses abut the highway, there is a gated entrance and a guard station. Beyond those, massive stadium lights rise up, holding vigil in an orange haze. There is all manner of steam, dust, and smoke brewing up from within the light, giving it the effect of an enormous cauldron. The sight is so overwhelming that the driver hasn’t yet noticed the sour sting of sulfur and other, more putrid gases. Now it clears his nose and brings tears to his eyes.

“This’s Ga’awful.” The latticework of smokestacks and gangways become a blur as the driver’s eyes water over and he has to fight just to keep them open. The trusty Chevrolet pickup, however, is impervious to the stench, and carries on, determined and quaking.

A fog horn, rattling the gut of anyone around to hear it, brings the driver back to the road. A wall of pipes atop a truck-bed, stacked lengthwise, blocks half the highway, no more than fifty yards from the driver. He can make out some sort of dark barrier ahead, but not much more than that.

Hinkley is nothing but scattered ranch buildings lit by single lamps. The air becomes thick with manure. The driver loves it. The pungent musk reminds him of the ranch he’s worked on for nearly ten months, and to which he will most likely never return. He rolls his window down further to take it all in. Combined with the chill of the night air, the grassy smell of horseshit is invigorating. In the fury of wind blowing past, a few faint neighs make themselves heard. The driver is reminded of the silent westerns he and his brothers would watch as kids growing up in Dearborn. For his brief time spent in California, even while working on the ranch, he never once considered himself to be living in The West: the everyman-for-himself wilderness of shootouts and Indian raids that so many still believe it to be.

The driver thinks of his home for the past year as just another wasteland with better weather. There were no heroes, and certainly no cowboy types. The poorer folk who lived in the low bungalows around Fresno, just like he and Paula, were rough but lived by no code other than ‘do what you need to get by.’ He has lived by that code all his life, certainly before anyone had to tell it to him. That’s why his actions now, and the ones that will be required further down the road, are no more remarkable to the driver than what he does every day to earn a living. The only difference is that these steps –more drastic and unexpected than anything else he has ever had to do- are in keeping with the magnitude of the circumstances: which, in fact, are life and death.

To be more precise, his is now a life driven towards death; and with her gone, it might just as well be his death too, and anyone else’s who stands in the way. The shape of a horse’s hindquarters is found by an electric lamp before disappearing again into purpleish black.