THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 7, EPISODE 3

The high desert's a pitiless old crow that, just before 66 cuts off 666 across the Arizona line, turns ridiculous... here, off the north side of the highway, stands Fort Courage. Shrine to the demented, departed F-Troop, certainly the second most inane, offensive series this side of Hogan's Heroes. Where have you gone Ken Berry, Forrest Tucker and you, especially, Larry Storch? Our nation turns its lonely viscera... etcetera... and is that Wile E. Coyote picking up his Acme mail-order parcel at the Post Office/General Store?

(No, just Don Rickles hamming it up as Chief Bald Eagle; a hundred hundred unemployed Navajo, Zuni and Apache within a hundred miles. Brian Palin did not spring from the Mime's head unbeckoned... rather he bubbled up from Antipodean currents of a planet ever marinated in banalities, in blood, and bloody crime. What wisdom shall the new generation... a Paul, a Max... implant into the goblin souls of new machines? Northern Arizona's only Costazul without rain, and with a wind chill factor and endless miles of sky.)

I can even pick up the oldies station in Grand Junction, Colorado, belting out Gene Vincent between ads for cattle wire and shovels... "and for Ed and Mary in Cortez and all the boys in Moab, a really moldy oldie from '69, 'It's a Happenin'!..."

Brendan kicked round New York, talking Vegas, but finally trailed us down to Salamanca's camposantos and the monkey ranch, flaking off pieces of himself. A snake unable to regrow his skin, Brendan's bleeding made for great art: a rock critic... one of the real ones, not some touslehaired Tiger Beat pussy... put "Man Without A Face" number fourteen on his All Time Top Seventy of the Seventies (behind Springsteen but ahead of the Sex Pistols, and with "Resonator" at fifty three, too!). Shedding ate away his soul until he had to find some corner to crawl into and disappear for awhile.

Speaking of self-invited embarrassments, Mitchell deflects my questions about Flagler tonight by pulling a Claude Rains in front of Cynthia and Wally as a tall fellow shambles from Delfinas' bar holding what could be Seven-up or water, but more likely is straight aguardiente or, perhaps, Bombay gin. "Is that who I believe it is?" Wally marvels.

"God counsels we forgive the slimy things, sea-sodden ancient mariners," I say.

"Seriously! I've seen his picture... it was all over those Spanish newspapers they sell here. Why do they sell three and four day old Mexican newspapers in this country, Mitchell... let me get a drink for you."

"Mariner?" Cynthia's puzzled.

"Don't you see the albatrosses dangling from his neck?"

Mitchell primps, running a hand through his coif... if maggots dropped out he'd keep smiling while he popped them into his mouth. "Now... who has funny ideas about a guest list?"

"It's my party," I remind them all, cry if you want to. "All I do," I add, with an audible grinding of green quartz molars, "is tell Ernie who stays, who goes and what is to be the nature of their going. Soft or hard." Mitchell's stuffed, for once, he thinks I've threatened him. A flutter of flattery seems to be breaking out at the door, meanwhile; I look towards the flurry, it seems directed at the Martyns or, following behind like a pair of Hal Cord's prize scavengers, Harry and Marilyn Joback. That must be... Marilyn's bodice exposes her breasts down to nipple's new frontier, the three diamond chokers round her neck are fake, but tell that to the Suelan window washers and popsicle-sellers suffering through what seems to be a long-coming summer of drought, stink and scanty tourism.

Harry scored dope for the Rambles through the Midwest, New York, even that disastrous no-show in Montreal... he denies ever turning Brendan on to heroin. "Coke sure, we all did coke, but I protected him... I kept him away from shit. Wally needed me to go to Seattle and Vancouver... that's all... otherwise I could have kept the sleaze away from him... you know what sort of sleaze gathers around musicians, Evie..."

Harry's never more fetching than when appealing to the higher powers...

But I, in fact, do know what money and notoriety does to people. Take that shit with Emil... I also had to buffer Jeff from fragments of the RSU so he could keep his ass clean, go to work in Boston, or maybe for Boeing in Seattle... Jeff would have grooved on trees, salmon, the mushrooms too, Egg, all of that healthy Northwestern shit. And Barry Freiberg had obtained the phone number to Second Avenue, he'd call me, whining... whining all about my so-called influence and how, if I really supported the oppressed and victims of the world, I'd nudge Brendan into doing benefits to bail out political prisoners... the autumn after summer of Czechago after the summer of love, Amurka teemed with hostages and death.

In Emil's lab on West Street I hear of the FEZ again, the floating erasure zone that has rippled outwards from Quarley Hall like magnetic epilepsy. Last February, in fact, Jeff giggled "ain't it a shame, them silvers with their dreams of pockets n'refrection? An' all feeling sorry for poor fucked up old Jeff Strych... well, let me tell you..."

And in that new, clear world, Brendan threw aside his ethos of the tortured, misunderstood artist, went disco, and was burned... cremated and buried, just one more broken entertainer in Zelda Fitzgerald's drag.

History is littered with such instances. Their carcasses spread alongside Carel Boulevard like swollen armadillos.

Like Jeff's old Studes.

I keep looking for their graveyard, tooling south on 666. There should be crosses of fenders, mufflers, offerings of oil. Pontiacs and Studes... Jeff wrote that he had a real Nazi staff car, '38 Mercedes, but only for a week... some actor wouldn't leave him alone, even followed him down 666, then up the mountain. So he sold it... thirty seven thousand profit. Wouldn't you?

Two miles of bad gravel road off 666, a right turn to an even worse path, almost impassable from mountain fallout, and I recognize the outline of Jeff's pentagon of wrecked trailers. Dead cars make surreal humps under February's moon, still full... this graveyard's not only elephantine but for mustangs, thunderbirds, cobras and continentals. And other species further up the hill.

"You must be Mrs. Stone," I hear the shape intone. "I'm Carol." If Jeff's weaned her off Thorazine, I don't want to know what substitute he's been packing into her pudding.

"Jeff's still at dinner. He told me to ask if you'd had anything."

"Actually..." and I write off the gas station tacos, "I haven't." I get out and lock the car... against what?... feeling my knees shimmering from the long drive. Carol's shape shifts between lantern and moonlight, doing that old rehab rag. Hello salvage-yard Ponderosa, hello Rancho Raton. Snow-dusted yard of old chairs and lost sofas leaking stuffing, old computers leaking silicon dioxide, toxics, wires. A satellite dish looms over all - civilization's round pulpit.

Carol steps out of the way, pointing inside. "He's there." The five old truck trailers are welded together, bridged by glass and mud brick and... to the left... a roaring fireplace of stacked rocks. Jeff rocks in the ol'chair, facing the flames, a bowl of something nestled in his lap. Gained weight's my first thought, seeing his profile.

The table's stacked with plastic bowls... bread, beans, a stew that looks heavy on turnips.

"Hello, Evie," Jeff remarks, unturning. Ancient, damned mariner, home, watching the sea as through a mirror in the fire.