THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 6, EPISODE 4

Jeff, on his mountain now, runs rats round the debris of information's ethic; Hal Cord... on his... is a rat, a desert scavenger, aprowl for all that glitters. I were Hal, I'd be rat-paranoid amongst all those vultures, but the birds are Hal's devouring little friends. His cover.

I ask Hal what buzzards do between movie assignments, Hal replies "they buzz". Then he asks me how Alice keeps unassigned slices of memory buzzy between assignments, and I say "she runs tests".

"Against whom?" Hal asks. "Ralph?"

"Against the competition." Our initialed brothers, public or private, are competition, as opposed to opposition, referred to as the Evil Empire since Star Wars. Environment... ARPANET and the IBM/ATT/GE monoliths... flickers between plateaus. Washington wants Alice knocked up and put out to pasture. The Kramdens consult to numerous secure projects... bureaucrats assume they will gladly surrender their protocols to Max when the Kid's born. "Think of these tests as games," I say.

Hal looks pained. "Games are for kids. Here we devise and adapt to scenarios."

Scenarios then... the tweaking of the FIT computers Middle Age Don once was commissioned to perform (and which had been handed over to Jeff like a dead rat through the buzzard cage) was simple... too simple... and, as far as I could detect, nonviolent. First, however, tea and scones with the Grandmaster in the Berkshires, wearing Blake's snarly snakeskin overcoat. T. nosebleeds unceasingly, west of Worcester. "Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night."

Cord and Abner, charlatans on mountains, like... the better to eat you with, after looking down to check, are Smokies on the way? The vulture ranch, tucked in a pocket of the Coastal Range north of Malibu (locals call it "the Heights"), is Alice's redoubt... a Berchtesgaden overlooking fire plains where Tom Mix and Gene Autry shot it out in Western movies. Hal's man Red's an old cowhand from movieland in his four wheeler with big tires, he answers with grizzled cowhand "yups" to my inquiries... yup, been a fire since Alice got planted under the mountain, ma'am but that don't mean beans... yup, we just went down under and waited. Into the tomb with Lady Madeleine Ussher.

"Jus' call me Red," he says again. "Forget your dilithium?" he cracks at Bob, slipping over rocks in city shoes. "Won't be long," he adds, flipping his cigarette into the bush. "Oh... try to be careful, yup!" he smiles, teeth gone or twisted 'round, brown, "... drought's on."

"We're short of rain in New York City too," I try to make conversation. Bob holds his stomach as we grind up a grade, hit the security fence and Red slides a card... an Omni uncle, a magnetic Neanderthal, into the slot.

Over my shoulder the Pacific purrs, that great blue pussycat playing with its mouse, waiting for just the right moment to reach out and swat us.

We reach a crest, go down into a bowl curving around another hill and here's a small plateau half the size of a football field dotted with Quonset huts like desert mushrooms. Everything else is scrub, two or three years' worth, a metal sign blackened by fire's illegible.

Bob points. "That's a bird in there."

"Vulture ranch," Red shrugs and honks for Hal to come out of one of the huts and meet us. "If you're lucky he won't play his harmonica."

Abner's hideaway was a little more traditional, this desolate old farmhouse just a shotgun's blast from the New York state line... a Puritan's abode overrun with wives, kids, acolytes. T. in his dark suit and gift bottle of champagne led the way into the kitchen; we see half a dozen kids on the floor watching Honeymooners' reruns out of Albany... the one where attorneys tell Ralph about Mrs. Monahan's forty million dollar estate. "We'll have something to eat, then talk," the Grandmaster declares.

"Where's Cash?" I ask.

"Taking care of business in New York City. That's one of the reasons I need help, keeping so many accounts independent of each other... and blameless in the gaze of tax people. We've a foundation for inquiry into matters spiritual, a sexual Peace Corps, Cash calls it... but in light of Nixon's sublimations, it might be interpreted beyond the legal pale."

And Red taps on the burned out buzzard sign, nodding towards Hal, who's changing tape in a camera hidden in a pile of rocks, little marmot of security.

"Hal Cord, remember? Glad you could make it, Mrs. Stone." He sticks out a hand, rough from work, covered with beak shaped scars. "Bob? Hope you had a better trip than last time. We're still on the books as Malibu Condor Reclamation Facility so everyone thinks government... five years and fifteen thousand fine for disturbing buzzards at their business. Nobody lays peepers on Alice without Lentex saying so. We've even had one of John Wayne's production managers escorted out."

Cord's a khaki sparkplug, all he need's chest and shouldersful of Merit Badges. "Condor's on the brink," he frowns. "Dogs. Poachers. Pesticides in eggshells... I say a society can't keep its vultures healthy's in one deep trench of turds. Anyway..." Hal directs us towards a hut from which no hawk squawks issue and inserts another card to get in, turns a key and an elevator opens.

"You did say there's a staircase in addition to these elevators," Bob worries, and Hal and Red exchange smiles. Of course, of course. Then Red goes off on some Red errand and we start down.

"Been to Salamanca recently?" Hal inquires. I say I haven't, mentioning this trip which in February's still just in the planning stage. "Too bad," Hal says. "I'm hoping to spend time down there again next winter when more casinos open... what will there be, six, eight of them? Good people... that Zamora kid, Ernesto, Nan. Know how to roast dolphin too."

Eighteen months ago Junior toasted Carter's drug-fighters by baking Flipper on a four hundred twenty pound pyre of captured weed to show, by God and Harry Anslinger, they knew what to do with dope in Costazul. Most everybody stood downwind except Berto... "Those were the days," Hal smiles, "all I miss are the bugs. Gets tiresome spooning spiders out of... what was that coffee that they have?"

"Nit."

"Cafe Nit. Hell of a name for coffee. Everytime I go to Costazul, I renew my acquaintance with the bugs. Hello, bugs!" The elevator eases, Hal stabs a black button with his forefinger, inserts a key. "Great times, drinking rum and gunpowder with those old pirates. Probably never see days like that again."

"Probably not. World gone to hell," I concur.

Bread baking in Abner's kitchen... good-smelling bread, no matchsticks. Louis Armstrong on the radio... "Jeepers Creepers" (peepers strike me as sinister) and, in the living room, Ed Norton declares: "I watch birds because they watch me!" Vibes get coolier and coolier. How have I reduced these memories to rocks?

Break in the rocks... Xul's passage I show to Jeff, a bridge of driftwood to this secret beach where we touched carefully, for his'd been sunburned. Blisters, lipsters, lobsters; Jeff found and peeled a dead snake, setting the skin out, drying in the sun. Hal Cord shooting baskets with Suelan boys and Jeff... Bud, I mean. If I'd brought food out here, ants would be crawling all over me by now. Hello, bugs!

Bugs I see smashed against the windshield all have faces. Brendan, Gunter... Cash and Barry arguing over money, waving antennae, T. coughing out thin mists of brown, buggy ichor. Squished and spread into ribbons, grimacing like snakes trying to crack turtles' shells they smear, disappear... mere experiments God's fingered, then destroyed.