The next was the blue Chevrolet, and he played withit as a child plays with a kitten, tormenting it into striking, then stopping it forever. He received both headlights. The sky had clouded over by then and there was a tentative mumbling of thunder.

The third was a black Jaguar XKE, which calls for thehighest skill possible and makes for a very brief momentof truth. There was blood as well as gasoline upon thesand before he dispatched it, for its side mirrors extendedfurther than one would think, and there was a red furrow across his rib cage before he had done with it.But he tore out its ignition system with such grace andartistry that the crowd boiled over into the ring, and theguards were called forth to beat them with clubs and herdthem with cattle prods back into their seats.

Surely, after all of this, none could say that DOSMuertos had ever known fear.

A cool breeze arose and I bought a soft drink andwaited for the last.

His final car sped forth while the light was still yellow.It was a mustard-colored Ford convertible. As it wentpast him the first time, it blew its horn and turned on itswindshield wipers. Everyone cheered, for they could seeit had spirit.

Then it came to a dead halt, shifted into reverse,and backed toward him at about forty miles an hour.

He got out of the way, sacrificing grace to expediency,and it braked sharply, shifted into low gear, and spedforward again.

He waved the cape and it was torn from his hands.If he had not thrown himself over backward, he wouldhave been struck. "•

Then someone cried: "It's out of alignment!"

But he got to his feet, recovered his cape andfaced it once more.

They still tell of those five passes that followed. Neverhas there been such a flirting with bumper and grill 1Never in all of the Earth has there been such an encounter between mechador and machine! The convertibleroared like ten centuries of streamlined death, and thespirit of St. Detroit sat in its driver's seat, grinning, whileDOS Muertos faced it with his tinfoil cape, cowed it andcalled for his wrench. It nursed its overheated engineand rolled its windows up and down, up and down, clearing its mumer the while with lavatory noises and muchblack smoke.

By then it was raining, softly, gently, and the thunderstill came about us. I finished my soft drink.

DOS Muertos had never used his monkey wrench onthe engine before, only upon the body. But this timehe threw it. Some experts say he was aiming at the dis-tributor; others say he was trying to break its fuelpump.

The crowd booed him.

Something gooey was dripping from the Ford onto thesand. The red streak brightened on Manolo's stomach.The rain came down.

He did not look at the crowd. He did not take hiseyes from the car. He held out his right hand, palm upward, and waited.

A panting pumper placed the screwdriver in his handand ran back toward the fence.

Manolo moved to the side and waited.It leaped at him and he struck.There was more booing.He had missed the kill.

No one left, though. The Ford swept around him in atight circle, smoke now emerging from its engine. Manolorubbed his arm and picked up the screwdriver and capehe had dropped. There was more booing as he did so.

By the time the car was upon him, flames were leaping forth from its engine.

Now some say that he struck and missed again, going off balance. Others say that he began to strike, grewafraid and drew back. Still others say that, perhaps foran instant, he knew a fatal pity for his spirited adversary,and that this had stayed his hand. I say that the smokewas too thick for any of them to say for certain whatbad happened.

But it swerved and he fell forward, and he was borneupon that engine, blazing like a god's catafalque, to meetwith his third death as they crashed into the fence together and went up into flames.

There was much dispute over the final corrida, butwhat remained of the tailpipe and both headlights wereburied with what remained of him, beneath the sands ofthe Plaza, and there was much weeping among womenhe had known. I say that he could not have been afraidor known pity, for his strength was as a river of rockets,his thighs were pistons and the fingers of his hands hadthe discretion of micrometers; his hair was a black haloand the angel of death rode on his right arm. Such aman, a man who has known truth, is mightier than anymachine. Such a man is above anything but the holdingof power and the wearing of glory.Now he is dead though, this one, for the third andfinal time. He is as dead as all the dead who have everdied before the bumper, under the grill, beneath thewheels. It is well that he cannot rise again, for I say thathis final car was his apotheosis, and anything else wouldbe anticlimactic. Once I saw a blade of grass growing upbetween the metal sheets of the world in a place wherethey had become loose, and I destroyed it because Ifelt it must be lonesome. Often have I regretted doingthis, for I took away the glory of its aloneness. Thusdoes life the machine, I feel, consider man, sternly, thenwith regret, and the heavens do weep upon him througheyes that grief has opened in the sky.

All the way home I thought of this thing, and thehoofs of my mount clicked upon the floor of the city as Irode through the rain toward evening, that spring.

I intended to write a nice, simple action-adventure storyand I had just finished reading Hunter Thompson's Hell'sAngels. I wrote this story. At my agent's suggestion, Ilater expanded it to book length. I like this versionbetter than the book. But if there hadn't been a bookthere probably wouldn't have been a movie sale. Onthe other hand, I was not overjoyed with the film. On theother hand, no one has to sit up in the middle of thenight to read the story....

The gull swooped by, seemed to hover a moment on unmoving wings.

Hell Tanner flipped his cigar butt at it and scored alucky hit. The bird uttered a hoarse cry and beat suddenly at the air. It climbed about fifty feet, and whetherit shrieked a second time, he would never know.

It was gone.

A single gray feather rocked in the violet sky,drifted out over the edge of the cliff and descended,swinging toward the ocean. Tanner chuckled through hisbeard, between the steady roar of the wind and thepounding of the surf. Then he took his feet down fromthe handlebars, kicked up the stand and gunned his bike to life.

He took the slope slowly till he came to the trail, then picked up speed and was doing fifty when he hit the highway.

He leaned forward and gunned it. He had the roadall to himself, and he laid on the gas pedal till there wasno place left for it to go. He raised his goggles and lookedat the world through crap-colored glasses, which waspretty much the way be looked at it without them, too.

All the old irons were gone from his jacket, and hemissed the swastika, the hammer and sickle and theupright finger, especially. He missed his old emblem,too. Maybe he could pick up one in Tijuana and havesome broad sew it on and ... No. It wouldn't do. AHthat was dead and gone. It would be a giveaway, and hewouldn't last a day. What he would do was sell theHarley, work his way down the coast, clean and squareand see what he could find in the other America.

He coasted down one hill and roared up another. Hetore through Laguoa Beach, Capistrano Beach, SanClemente and San Onofre. He made it down to Oceanside, where he refueled, and he passed on through Carlsbad and all those dead little beaches that fill the shorespace before Solana Beach Del Mar. It was outside SanDiego that they were waiting for him.

He saw the roadblock and turned. They were not surehow he had managed it that quickly, at that speed.But now he was heading away from them. He beard thegunshots and kept going. Then he heard the sirens.