THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 1, EPISODE 6

"Wonder how long it takes before frog boy realizes we're gone?" Brendan smirked, rinsing his mouth with Cutty. Good graves honor dental hygiene. Darkell had given notice, the band with many names sent down to rock and roll Arimathea. Matty had pawned his drums to finance a weeklong high and Brendan, yielding his life up to the Alien Hand, steered Jeff's red truck towards oblivion.

"He only teaches biology because there's a shortage of TA's and the course is a requirement. No freshman in his right mind takes electrical engineering," I defended Jeff, "they'd flunk and lose their deferments."

"So that's what he is," Brendan smirked, fondling my knee, "an AC/DC engineer? You think he could fix my guitar? Make it do what Hendrix does?"

In Cap Hatien he'd have Eileen read to him as he tuned his guitar... Graham Greene, Castaneda. "He says the holes in sounds are used by sorcerers to find allies," Eileen suggested. "Like, certain guitar strings can catch spirits... they're hard to find, he says, and sort of dangerous. One needs impeccable will to hold them at bay."

Lauren Leonard's funeral - now that was music of a wilder, stranger pitch. It was a Tuesday, bleak, serious snowing never happened but the sky hung gray and threatening while Manuel drove Bud and I out to Long island where the Leonard plot lay... not so far from Uli's waterfront compound.

Wilson had been tearing up covenants all week. Not only was Paul not to be brought down from Dog School, Goff had even been instructed to withhold news of his mother's death. And though she'd told me... among others... that she wanted to be burned and scattered in the mountains outside Santa Fe, Wilson had brought Lauren's body back... from what I've gathered, darkness lay over the whole affair. Rent-a-spooks muttering about oil gluts, the "bidness" and Sicilians glancing one to another with hooded eyes. Even, as Alice tells me, Libyans.

Lauren had, according to the New Mexico police report, a .357 Magnum in her coat, a shotgun in the cab and a blood alcohol count of point 19. Death knocked the morning of her fifty second birthday. Ralph suspects iniquity...

So what I've done to improve Paul... with the full knowledge and consent of his father, Egg, well almost... is only an example of what the environment stands to do to you, were I to let you pass over. There is helplessness to unwanted things, especially those with dangerous talents. Great forces menaced by subtle innocence; Plutarch's Sibyl of frenzied lips "uttering mirthless, unembellished, unperfumed... penetrates through centuries by the powers of Gods." Gunter possessed copies of her folios... originals, of course, destroyed by fire fifty two years before Christ's birth and the first generation of counterfeits burned, again, by the Vandal Stilicho five hundred years after.

Copies of doubtful copies passed down through the hands of alchemists and antipopes... they form one of many guides towards circles drawn within triangles in the dark room of Costazul's old torturer. Francisco Pom drew lists of enemies to be shot from diving boards of the Armoria swimming pool, drained now, to make room for the Kramden peripherals, for General Johnny and his team and for Tess - whose heart's desire is to linger on the polluted Suelan beach, roasting his buttocks, heavy as slabs of Siberian beef, pink as cotton candy.