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.