The Damned Highway (21 page)

If this road trip to DC is any indication, then the answer is no. We're all on edge after the near crash, all counting coup and looking to settle scores of our own. Smitty mutters about eyes in the bushes and then hunches over the wheel. He apologizes, a little bit, and says that he doesn't need a “cherry daddy on this mission.” Something like a man, but with giant moth wings, had run out into the road. He says that's what made him lose control of the truck. It wasn't at all my remark about him and federal arch-fag J. Edgar Hoover that got him all worked up—no, sir. My lawyer, meanwhile, is picking on his teeth, working a thick thumbnail between them and sucking hard. He is deep in thought about whatever it is his kind think about when they have idle time on their hands. Betsy, sitting beside me, has her hand on my knee. We bonded a bit after we stopped the truck and spilled out, woozy and dizzy, to gather up the pages of
Unspeakable Cults
. The last thing America needed was for a wind to pick up and one of the blasphemous pages to slap against some poor slob's windshield at the wrong moment. Imagine the chaos that could ensue. Where were you when the fun stopped, eh? And poor Betsy . . . poor, darling girl. She doesn't know that I know she is
COINTELPRO, but it's obvious. At least, it's obvious to me. I am a professional.

By the time we pull into Washington, DC, it is morning. May Day morning, the counselor tells us. A holiday with an American origin, but we can't tell from the Monday-morning traffic snaking into the city. My lawyer is hanging out the window, by turns waving my Leatherman and beating on the passenger-side door with his cinderblock of a fist. “Hey, pigs! You're all shitting yourself because of those Russky missiles on the news this morning? Well, you all fucking better be!
Viva la revolución
! We're here to hang your asses!”

Betsy snaps, “Hey, you'd better relax, mister. The DC cops don't mess around, and we already look suspicious.”

“Well then, I'll give 'em something to look at!” he says, and I put my hands up to the ceiling. This is not our first trip together, and I know what he's going for. Betsy foolishly thinks it's her and throws her forearms over her chest, protecting her breasts and drawing further attention to them. Ignoring her, my lawyer reaches for the bag and grabs two great handfuls of sheets from
Unspeakable Cults
, then flings them out the window. “Go on, here are some incendiary leaflets for you! Read 'em and weep, you bloodsucking leeches!”

Betsy screams and tries to dig her nails into my lawyer's arm. “Hey, that's assault and battery,” I say. “That's a crime, and a tort! Don't liberal-arts colleges teach basic survival skills?” I grab her wrists and upset the bag. Even Smitty takes a few pages and dumps them out the window. “We were taught this book like catechism in school. Never hurt me a'tall,” he says.

As I said, can you imagine the chaos that would ensue? Where were you when the fun stopped?

The traffic ahead of us remains slow, but behind us it snarls into impossible gridlock. Some commuters leave their cars to gather up the pages, others just rev their engines and grind ever forward, rear-ending the vehicles ahead and keeping their feet on the pedals to push and push and push some more. There are curses, some crunching, a few screams, the sound of grapes slowly crushed on the hot concrete, and suddenly the off ramp is ours alone.

“Save a few of those pages,” I say. “It's our way into the Department of Justice and Hoover's office.”

“You're just going to waltz up to Hoover,” Betsy says, “and expect no resistance, no obstacles, and—”

“And hand you over to him, yes. By God, you have been paying attention. I knew there was a reason I made you my assistant!”

Smitty mutters next to me, but at least this time he doesn't jerk the clutch hard enough to give us all concussions.

“Hoover's a freemason, you know,” my lawyer says. “On the square.” He shuffles through a few of the
Unspeakable Cults
pages. “He'll fucking love this stuff. If he doesn't already stuff his bra with pages from his own collection of occult tomes, that is. Hey, look at this.” He holds up one featuring peculiar geometric designs—a five-pointed star, the shape of a compass, a triangle. “A map of the city.”

“Of this city?” Smitty asks suddenly.

“Yeah,” my lawyer tells him. “Of Washington, DC, man!”

Smitty seems nervous. “Is this Moloch territory . . . or Cthulhu?”

Betsy sniffs. “You mean you don't know, fish face?”

“Man, Betsy girl, you're not a very good travel companion,” my lawyer says. “This is what this election is all about, let me tell you,” he tells Smitty. “That's what I learned down below, on Devil's Reef. Nineteen seventy-two is
it
. Moloch or Cthulhu? That's the million-dollar fucking question, isn't it? That's the question burrowing away like a rat in the back of everyone's brain, and most of these poor bastards we're freaking out don't even know what's causing their damn migraines. They probably just blame saccharin.” He snorts, filling the whole cab with steam.

“Never mind that right now,” I say, “because here come the police.” And then we are surrounded by black-and-whites, and a handful of cops in riot helmets snake between the cars with their long, antibeatnik truncheons held high, and there, trotting toward us in the distance, are a trio of officers on horseback. And this is the American Nightmare in the end, isn't it? Two horrifying choices, and the only people with even an inkling of how to stop it are surrounding by well-ironed fascists with licenses to kill. I open my mouth to say something poignant and meaningful, but the air brakes protest like drunken banshees as Smitty grinds us to an abrupt halt, and for the second time on this leg of the journey, we meet the dashboard.

As has often happened to me in my life as a journalist, I am dragged from where I've been sitting, separated from my possessions, and then the shit is beaten out of me by some hoods—law-enforcement officers are nearly always hoods themselves, given purpose and clarity in their violence by the state. It reminds me of Chicago, and what a fun time that was, eh? My lawyer bellows and screams, and a cop goes flying. Smitty falls under the hooves. The horse whinnies and does a little two-step on him. Betsy, as I'd predicted, slips past the makeshift cordon of police cars and watches the chaos. The last thing I see is my lawyer swinging a wild haymaker at one of the cop's horses. The beast falls flat and loses consciousness, and then, a second later, so do I.

——

I awake on a hard slab in what appears to be a dusty warehouse—another fairly common occurrence in my working life—but this time the woman standing over me isn't a sensitive and starving young Puerto Rican whore, all hips and breasts and tongue, but Betsy, wan as usual and wringing her hands nervously. Just as she did the other day, in fact, the last time I was in this predicament. My hands and ankles are strapped to the slab. There's something on my head, some sort of hat or other bizarre contraption that brings to mind Ken Kesey's novel. All in all, I think the plan is going pretty well, and that makes me smile. I wish I had a cigarette, or some more fungi. No, scratch that. Last thing I need right now is to go tripping. I'll save that for the victory celebration.

“Thank you,” I say. And then she understands. Her face falls into utter despair, and it is a wonderful thing to see. Betsy has never been more beautiful than she is at that moment. At least not to me. I decide to push further. “You know, Lenin never worried about spies. He wasn't concerned with COINTELPRO or anything like that. Paranoia never consumed the Bolsheviks. Nope, not Lenin. That old Commie just assumed that the Party was full of czarist agents, and he put them all to work. Whatever intel they gathered or traps they laid or plots they hatched didn't matter, because just to keep themselves busy so they could remain members in good standing took up all their free time.”

“How did you know who I worked for . . .”

“It was easy, sweetheart,” I tell her. “First of all, and most obviously, your politics made no fucking sense whatsoever. Even a deaf and dumb wombat would have seen through that nonsense. You just flapped your lips about unity, or the People, or the Republicans, as though you had memorized from
Cliffs Notes for Radicals
. . . well, skimmed, more likely. And your skirt never once wandered even an inch above your knee. You also didn't go mad when exposed to the pages of
Unspeakable Cults
.”

“
You
didn't go mad either. Neither did that bag of human garbage you call an attorney.” I smile at her again, showing off every one of my teeth, until she gets it. “Look, it doesn't matter,” Betsy says. “Mr. Hoover will be here soon to explain what we want with you.”

“Is he currently powdering his nose? Or putting on his bra? Perhaps a nice, lacy little strapless number?”

“No,” Hoover's distinctive voice comes from somewhere. “I'm here and ready for you.”
Rheadah foh yaw
. “Thank you, Miss Betsy; you may leave.”

“Yes, Betsy, you've served your purpose well. Hooray for you! Well done, lass. Be sure to sashay out of here and into a loveless marriage with a water-headed Goldwater supporter. He'll knock you up good, and keep you in Valium and martinis until skin cancer or an in-ground pool accident takes you in your forties. Have a nice life!”

She leaves without another word, without even a victorious saunter, and I turn my attention on the man of the hour. He's much shorter in person than you might expect.

“So, Mr. Hoover, am I to be sacrificed in order to ensure a fifty-state sweep for Nixon?” I ask.

“Oh, that won't be necessary,” he says casually. Always a clever little bulldog of a man—does he mean that he doesn't care about the fifty-state election result that Nixon needs to complete his diabolical plot, or that his forces have already guaranteed the result he wants the old-fashioned way through crooked voting machines, agents in every ward, mass hypnosis, intimidation, LSD in the reservoirs, subliminal messages buried in the headlines of the major newspapers and scratched into the grooves of Perry Como and Pat Boone albums, and last-minute censorship of Negro music?

“You seem in fine fettle. No particular brain damage from various injuries and abuse of illicit substances anyway. That's good,” he says, appraising me like a side of beef.

“Well, I am a doctor, after all,” I remind him.

“Yes, yes. Doctor. Journalist. Local god of the indigenous Hawaiian population.”

“Yes. All of those and more.”

“Sportsman, reprobate,” he continues. “Degenerate.”

“Be nice now,” I say.

“Inspiration for a comic-strip character,” he adds.

“You goddamned swine,” I say. “You really know how to hurt a guy.”

“I do.” Finally, Hoover stands over me. He's not looking well. Gray, like his own photo in the newspaper, and extra jowly, which is quite an achievement in Washington, DC. In his hands he holds a pair of metal canisters, thinner than a Thermos but about as long.

“So what's the story here, eh? What do you have there? I think you'd better buy me dinner first, Josephine, before we get down to business.”

“Your juvenile scatology doesn't suit your reputation as a wordsmith, Lono,” he says. He says my false name slowly, enunciating every syllable. Hoover's a true pig, through and through. I can tell because he doesn't sweat, he doesn't lick his lips, he doesn't frown or react at all to mere human words, outside of what seem to be programmed responses. He doesn't even blink. And then he surprises me. “And your reputation is what I need. I need you, Lono. Your country needs you.”

After I finish laughing, he strikes one of the canisters against the other, setting off a hollow-feeling tone. “You can get close to Nixon. You've done it before. And even if you can't, then
I
can get you close to Nixon. Do you know what these are?”

“Are they . . .” I think back to the few seconds I spent flipping through the original
Unspeakable Cults
manuscript back at the library as I fed those blasphemous pages into the Mojo Wire.
“Mi-Go brain canisters?”

“Correct,” he says. He sits on the corner of the slab, his buttocks spreading conversationally.

And what ugly bastards the Mi-Go were. The woodcutting of them in the
Unspeakable Cults
manuscript showed a giant, pink, crablike thing with wings. Instead of skin, the creature was made out of fungus, and instead of a head, it had a series of fleshy rings shaped like a pyramid, complete with antennae on top. According to what I read, the Mi-Go could transport humans—and other creatures—from Earth to outer space and back again by removing their victim's brain and placing it in a brain canister like the one Hoover held. They could then hook the canisters up to a machine that allowed the brain to see, hear, and even speak. Hideous, monstrous things, the Mi-Go, but I'd still rather take my chances with them than be caught on the street after dark in Cleveland on a Saturday night. But I digress.

“Mi-Go,” I say to Hoover. “Sounds like a cheaply made foreign car, doesn't it?”

“Indeed it does. What do you know of my career, Dr. Lono?”

“Well, I know that you've outlived eight presidents—”

“Please,” Hoover says, “Eight
administrations
. A significant difference.” He peers down at the objects in his hands, as if admiring them for the first time. I shiver then, and it has nothing to do with the temperature in the room. “I entered public service during the Great War. I was head of the Enemy Aliens Registration Section. This was before the FBI was founded, of course. And there were aliens among us then, Dr. Lono. Not just Reds from Russia and Germany either.” He moves his gaze up toward the ceiling. “We found these canisters in Brattleboro, Vermont. It's taken us decades to figure out their use and how to reverse engineer them. Amazing things, really. They allow their user to remove and store a healthy human brain without killing it.”