It was just after midnight when I first saw the sheep. I was running about eighty-eight or ninety miles an hour in a drenching, blinding rain on U.S. 40 between Winnemucca and Elko with one light out. I was soaking wet from the water that was pouring in through a hole in the front roof of the car, and my fingers were like rotten icicles on the steering wheel.
It was a moonless night and I knew I was hydroplaning, which is dangerous ... My front tires were no longer in touch with the asphalt or anything else. My center of gravity was too high. There was no visibility on the road, none at all. I could have tossed a flat rock a lot farther than I could see in front of me that night through the rain and the ground fog. There is a total understanding, all at once, of how the captain of the Titanic must have felt when he first saw the Iceberg.
And not much different from the hideous feeling that gripped me when the beam of my Long-Reach Super-Halogen headlights picked up what appeared to be a massive rock slide across the highway—right in front of me, blocking the road completely. Big white rocks and round boulders, looming up with no warning in a fog of rising steam or swamp gas . . .
The brakes were useless, the car was wandering. The rear end was coming around. I jammed it down into Low, but it made no difference, so I straightened it out and braced for a crash that would probably kill me. This is It, I thought. This is how it happens—slamming into a pile of rocks at one hundred miles an hour, a sudden brutal death in a fast red car on a moonless night in a rainstorm somewhere on the sleazy outskirts of Elko. I felt vaguely embarrassed, in that long pure instant before I went into the rocks. I remembered Los Lobos and that I wanted to call Maria when I got to Elko . . .
My heart was full of joy as I took the first hit, which was oddly soft and painless. Just a sickening thud, like running over a body, a corpse—or, ye fucking gods, a crippled two-hundred-pound sheep thrashing around in the road.
Yes. These huge white lumps were not boulders. They were sheep. Dead and dying sheep. More and more of them, impossible to miss at this speed, piled up on each other like bodies at the battle of Shiloh. It was like running over wet logs. Horrible, horrible . . .
And then I saw the man—a leaping Human Figure in the glare of my bouncing headlights, waving his arms and yelling, trying to flag me down. I swerved to avoid hitting him, but he seemed not to see me, rushing straight into my headlights like a blind man ... or a monster from Mars with no pulse, covered with blood and hysterical.
It looked like a small black gentleman in a London Fog raincoat, frantic to get my attention. It was so ugly that my brain refused to accept it ... Don’t worry, I thought. This is only an Acid flashback. Be calm. This is not really happening.
I was down to about thirty-five or thirty when I zoomed past the man in the raincoat and bashed the brains out of a struggling sheep, which helped to reduce my speed, as the car went airborne again, then bounced to a shuddering stop just before I hit the smoking, overturned hulk of what looked like a white Cadillac limousine, with people still inside. It was a nightmare. Some fool had crashed into a herd of sheep at high speed and rolled into the desert like an eggbeater.
We were able to laugh about it later, but it took a while to calm down. What the hell? It was only an accident. The Judge had murdered some range animals.
So what? Only a racist maniac would run sheep on the highway in a thunderstorm at this hour of the night. “Fuck those people!” he snapped, as I took off toward Elko with him and his two female companions tucked safely into my car, which had suffered major cosmetic damage but nothing serious. “They’ll never get away with this Negligence!” he said. “We’ll eat them alive in court. Take my word for it. We are about to become joint owners of a huge Nevada sheep ranch.”
Wonderful, I thought. But meanwhile we were leaving the scene of a very conspicuous wreck that was sure to be noticed by morning, and the whole front of my car was gummed up with wool and sheep’s blood. There was no way I could leave it parked on the street in Elko, where I’d planned to stop for the night (maybe two or three nights, for that matter) to visit with some old friends who were attending a kind of Appalachian Conference for sex-film distributors at the legendary Commercial Hotel . . .
Never mind that, I thought. Things have changed. I was suddenly a Victim of Tragedy—injured and on the run, far out in the middle of sheep country—one thousand miles from home with a car full of obviously criminal hitchhikers who were spattered with blood and cursing angrily at each other as we zoomed through the blinding monsoon.
Jesus, I thought. Who are these people?
Who indeed? They seemed not to notice me. The two women fighting in the backseat were hookers. No doubt about that. I had seen them in my headlights as they struggled in the wreckage of the Cadillac, which had killed about sixty sheep. They were desperate with Fear and Confusion, crawling wildly across the sheep ... One was a tall black girl in a white minidress ... and now she was screaming at the other one, a young blond white woman. They were both drunk. Sounds of struggle came from the backseat. “Get your hands off me, Bitch!” Then a voice cried out: “Help me, Judge! Help! She’s killing me!”