Solange leads Slothrop off to the baths, and Bodine continues to search for his customer, 2½ bottles of cocaine clinking and clammy against his bare stomach under his skivvy shirt. The Major isn’t at any of the poker or crap games, nor attending the floor show wherein one Yolande, blonde and shining all over with baby oil, dances table to table picking up florin pieces and sovereigns, often hot from the flame of some joker’s Zippo, between the prehensile lips of her cunt—nor is he drinking, nor, according to Monika, Putzi’s genial, cigar-smoking, matelassé-suited madame, is he screwing. He hasn’t even been by to hassle the piano player for “San Antonio Rose.” It takes Bodine half an hour before colliding with the man finally, reeling out the swinging doors of a pissoir, groggy from a confrontation with the notorious Eisenkröte, known throughout the Zone as the ultimate test of manhood, before which bemedaled and brevetted Krautkillers, as well as the baddest shit-on-my-dick-or-blood-on-my-blade escapees from the grossest of Zonal stockades, all have been known to shrink, swoon, chicken out, and on occasion vomit, yes right where they stood. For it is indeed an Iron Toad, faithfully rendered, thousand-warted and some say faintly smiling, a foot long at its longest, lurking at the bottom of a rank shit-stained toilet and hooked up to the European Grid through a rheostat control rigged to deliver varying though not lethal surges of voltage and current. No one knows who sits behind the secret rheostat (some say it’s the half-mythical Putzi himself), or if it isn’t in fact hooked up to an automatic timer, for not everybody gets caught, really—you can piss on the Toad without anything at all happening. But you just never know. Often enough to matter, the current will be there—piranha-raid and salmon-climb up the gold glittering fall of piss, your treacherous ladder of salts and acids, bringing you back into touch with Mother Ground, the great, the planetary pool of electrons making you one with your prototype, the legendary poor drunk, too drunk to know anything, pissing on some long-ago third rail and fulminated to charcoal, to epileptic night, his scream not even his own but the electricity’s, the amps speaking through his already shattering vessel, shattered too soon for them even to begin to say it, voice their terrible release from silence, nobody listening anyhow, some watchman poking down the track, some old man unable to sleep out for a walk, some city drifter on a bench under a million June bugs in green nimbus around the streetlight, his neck relaxing and tightening in and out of dreams and maybe it was only a cat screwing, a church bell in a high wind, a window being broken, no direction to it, not even alarming, replaced swiftly by the old, the coal-gas and Lysol, silence. And somebody else finds him next morning. Or you can find him any night at Putzi’s if you’re man enough to go in piss on that Toad. The Major has got off this time with only a mild jolt, and is in a self-congratulating mood.