He trudged along on the right side of the road with his hands in his coat pockets and his shoulders hunched. No car had passed for over an hour and the man grumbled that these country people probably wouldn’t pick him up anyway. But as he topped a slight upgrade in the road a car silently moved up alongside him and stopped in the center of the right hand lane. It was an old heap, a Ford sedan probably fifteen or twenty years old, dimly glistening from the rain. The man grabbed the handle, yanked the door open, and got in.

      “Phew! It’s about damn time someone came along this road. I thought I was going to have to walk all the way....” Glancing toward the driver’s side of the car, he stopped speaking and his face froze with his mouth open. There was no one in the driver’s seat.

      He tried to think: had the car been there all along, abandoned in the middle of the road? No, dark as it was, he would have seen it as he approached and he did see the car, from the corner of his eye, come up silently from behind him. He dreaded to think that it might have just appeared there. And now he thought he might be hearing something under the hissing of the rain and the moaning of the wind. It was a chuffing sound like that of a distant bellows but he couldn’t even be sure he was hearing it.

      The car started to move.

      Slowly it crept along the road and the man, his mouth dry and his eyes wide found that he couldn’t move. Clouds slid aside to reveal the moon; moonlight shining down through the pouring rain produced tiny points of light that flashed on and off like a million fireflies. Vaguely, through the water pouring down the windshield, the man watched the piñon trees bending forward and back flailing their branches like madwomen as though frantically warning him to leave the car and run.

      A short way ahead, the road curved to the left to avoid a deep and rocky arroyo which, the man knew, was now full of muddy water ten feet deep, plunging at a rate that could knock over a strong and healthy man. The man wanted to jump from the car as it approached the arroyo but he was too frightened to move.

      Just as the car neared the bend and the man was sure they were about to tumble in, a hand came in through the driver’s window. It grasped the steering wheel, pulled downward, and the car turned with it. As the road straightened out, the hand slipped back through the curtain of pouring rain that enclosed the driver’s window. The man had watched this from the corner of his eye, not daring to turn his head, and now sat stiffly in his seat staring straight in front of him.

      As the arroyo and the road bent away from each other and the sound of rushing water faded, that chuffing sound he’d thought he’d heard back when he first got into the car grew louder. It reminded him of the sound an old locomotive would make when building up steam and it gave him the impression that something was bearing down on him. Would that hand come into his window next? Hope appeared in the form of a cantina’s red, blinking sign. It was about two hundred yards ahead as the crow would fly but more than that by the road which curved ahead. Curved ahead. The man didn’t know whether he wanted the car to trundle off the road into the mud or....

      The dark hand once more entered the driver’s window and groped for the steering wheel. The man, getting some courage from the sight of the cantina’s lights, yanked on the door handle and plunged into the rain. Straight for the cantina’s lights he ran. Splashing through mud—the thick, sticky caliche of New Mexico—he dodged the moaning, flailing piñon trees whose branches grasped at his coat and whose roots tripped him time and time again.

      Finally, his face and the front of his coat and pants smeared with mud from his many falls, the man made it to the cantina. He barged through the door, stomped directly to the bar and, slapping down a five dollar bill, he demanded a tequila. Then he demanded another one.

      Three lights set in the ceiling illuminated the cantina: one at the back, one in the middle and one just inside the door. The one inside the door had burned out and the dozen or so people in the cantina were surprised to see that the figure who had emerged with such energy from the shadows was all covered with mud. None of them said anything, though. They all knew him by sight and didn’t like him.

      So they all sat watching him curiously and, when he had gulped his second shot of tequila, the man began to talk in a loud and quaking voice about the “ghost car.” They all stared at him as he went on and on and, when he finally ran down, he stared back at them. No one said a word to him. Just like usual, the man thought. None of these people ever talk to me.

      The rain dripped outside. The cantina’s sign buzzed every few seconds. There was a light tap on a table as someone set a glass down. They all regarded him; he regarded them. Then he heard the door open. The sound of the rain grew louder until the door closed again. And in the silence he heard that chuffing sound he’d heard in the car.

      Slowly he turned. In the shadows by the door stood two hooded figures. The silhouettes of their dark robes were outlined in red intermittently as the cantina’s sign, backlighting them, buzzed on and off. Their hoods swiveled to the mud covered man. One of the figures raised his arm to point at him.

      “Oh, no, no, no, no,...” the man moaned. The last thing he saw as he slid off the bar stool was the two figures lunging toward him.

      But they were too late to catch him and he splatted onto the floor in a dead faint. The one who had pointed at him squatted down to check his pulse. Then he stood up and swept back the hood of his rain poncho. The bartender recognized him as a local farmer. The man was breathing hard as though he had just been performing some kind of exertion. The bartender leaned with his elbows on the bar.

      “He OK?” he asked the man.

      The man shrugged. “Fainted, I guess.”

      The bartender pushed himself off the bar to go get a glass of water to toss into the fainted man’s face. “He just gave us a long story about a ghost car or something,” he told them. “Something out there scared him to death. You know him?”

      The two new arrivals looked at each other and laughed. Then, to the bartender, the first one said, “Yeah, we know him. He’s the pendejo that got into our car while we were pushing it.”