THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 7, EPISODE 6

Carol serves up spaghetti in polished hubcaps wrenched off phaetons of G.E.'s Theater... from the Cleavers' and the Danny Thomas show. Jeff pours wine thick as blood, and as expensive... that afternoon he'd closed a Stude sale to a candlestick maker. The kids make little cat faces over their cups. Carol gathers hubcaps and chalices, jelly jar glasses with cartoon and Disney characters and Jeff picks up a greasy paper bag, suggesting: "let's walk."

The mountain air's a slap in the face. I turn... "they voted today, I might already have been elected to the Quad board.

"Hmmm," Jeff hums, drowsily. "Never figured how that happens, you own the stock, how can they keep you off? Well, I guess it's none of my business. Maybe you could take it up with Mitch, hear he's going to run for Congress."

"As a Republican."

"Where he belongs." Jeff had started towards the workshop but cut south, following thick gray cables that terminated at the satellite dish, wound round the outcrop of a hill and finally vanished at a mount of jagged junk... every gone-to-hell machine of the last twenty years, stripped, cannibalized and left to die. Keyboards, transistor beds, hell, even old vacuum tubes and miles of coiling wires. Here and something that didn't look cyberian... a coffee can, a little Negro doll missing her left arm. Now Jeff opens his bag, I smell the household garbage... long spaghetti strands, turnip and apple peels, coffee grounds from breakfast, tin cans with crooked lids.

"Nice little nest," I comment, watching the whole mess splatter over the remnants of Altairs and Vaxim, vacuum tubes, manuals. "What was all that stuff you were carrying when the pigs broke up Mitchell's putsch?

"Bread," he'd said. "Onions. Oranges. Other stuff... those little cakes, two for fifteen cents we lived on. Candy. Porto Rico soda, lime and pineapple..."

The ratpile hummed and radiated.

"This stuff's warm," I said. "It's on!"

No, Jeff smiles, "... used to be, though. Ran cables from a generator in the shed until a chain reaction started, but all the organics decomposing and animals create their own heat now... heat and energy. Mostly rats, rock squirrels, few coyote pups way in the middle, it's both their nest and food source. Rats are telepathic, you know, or so this rat fellow in Sedona nature magazines believes. They communicate magnetically with other rats, with machines, analog... anything that vibrates. Listen to our thoughts and we choose to disbelieve... Americans, I mean. Remember those Uay kids some tourist took pictures of and then one of them died, you told me? Waves!"

After breakfast, Jeff drove me into the Valley of Surprises, whose rock formations the Navaho call vortices... male-female resonators no less powerful than Sphinx, the Bell and Courthouse Rocks by Lloyd Wright's digs, only less graffitied. "Just as if Ralph and Alice existed a thousand years ago," he'd said. "Heave ho... what a concentration of vibes!"

"What a stink!" Salamanca, even under La Grua, has nothing on Jeff's ratpile.

"Yeah, lot of methane round. One of these days... one of these days Evie," he repeats, smiling... "gonna throw on one too many bags of trash and Pow! Straight to the moon! Those Gallup witch doctors see this whole mountain go up in a fireball and Army people will be hushing UFO rumors. Be raining rats and microprocessors all over the desert, pieces of Streichs and Studebakers, boxes of Acme dynamite..."

The moon gives Jeff's jack-o-lantern face the look of a wind blowing dead leaves through windows of a posh but frozen awards ceremony - maybe the Nobels. "If Russia doesn't have the ytz to blow the world up, anymore... well, I guess it's down to us. Isn't it?"