“Do you see those lights over there?”

He squinted behind his ‘script shades.

“That’s the old ghost town of Ballarat – and old silver mining town that went tits up 100 years ago. Seldom Seen Slim died there in 1968.”

“People still live there?”

“People? Well, at one time the Manson Family lived there. Nowadays, it is just some guy named Rock Novak that runs the general store, and he is probably the guy that has left the light on.”

“Rock Novak? Did you make that name up?”

“No, his name and his chiseled physique are both out of Central Casting, I’ll grant you. But I think the guy he replaced at the general store – and this is just a theory – was a member of the Manson family.”

“How do you know this stuff?”

“I dunno. I drive out here a lot, poke around and ask questions. This place just speaks to me.”

We were the only vehicle on the highway. We motored past Ballarat, the solar-powered night reading light of Rock Novak a mere speck in the rear view mirror. The rage of the rain continued to pummel the windshield and the engine cowl and the lapses in the conversation were interrupted only by more frantic sweeping of the AM radio band and an occasional PPPUUHHH-WWHHOOSSH!!! of the Chrysler hydroplaning across a small lake that gathered spontaneously on the nether pockets of the desert floor. Each time the water enveloped the coupe into a concatenated cocoon it was like an Invisible Hand was flushing God’s commode and we were its waste-paper detritus.

“Christ, can you slow down a little?” the near-blind man asked from the passenger seat.

“I’ll try dude, but we have a lot of tough miles before we get to Los Angeles. The faster we go, the less time we’ll spend in this shit.”

PPPUUHHH-WWHHOOSSH!!!

We began a careful ascent up a narrow, corkscrewing passage that divided the Panamint Valley from the town of Trona. Trona is named after the chemical that is mined there, and is as close as any municipality gets to an actual company town, as depicted by, say, John Ford in HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY. However, if anybody re-makes the movie and sets in Trona, they would do well to substitute “green” for either “toxic” or maybe just “putrid.”

The road got wetter and the curves got tighter, and I never hit the brakes while cornering, allowing the negative impulse of merely removing my right foot from the throttle to serve as the necessary inertia and negative g’s to keep everything under control, meanwhile nudging the manumatic transmission between the 2 and 3 positions, depending on the geometry of the corner as well as the degrees of the incline, whilst looking for rocks and potholes lurking around any bend.

We were creeping up around a particularly pinched apex, when I noticed the bounced reflection of another car’s headlamps. We had not seen another vehicle since we made the turn off of Highway 190 over a half hour ago. The lack of traffic was no source of comfort and seemed to underscore the dicey-ness of the situation I had put us in. The lights of what I thought were an approaching automobile failed to get any closer, and the wail of a horn punctured the clatter of the pelting rain.

I could see an economy car off the side of the mountain in the shadow of the ingress/egress of the next curve in the road and I slowed to a crawl, trying to figure exactly which David Lynch movie Jack and I had driven into.

As we pulled up parallel to the taillights and the ass end of a bondo-ed and beaten Japanese car teetering on a rock off the shoulder of the road where a guardrail would normally rest, I rolled down the window and Jack and I tried to assess the situation. Was the horn a notice that somebody was dead, impaled on the steering wheel?