The Damned Highway (13 page)

There it is again. Smitty says
aren't
instead of
ain't
. I wonder how long the change will take, and which is the real him—are the shrooms a gateway or a metamorphosis, or an apocalypse in that most literal of ways: the rending of the veil and a revelation of what squirms beneath it? Then I lay down the newspapers and examine my own hands, turning them back and forth, looking for any knobs or growths, even a suspect mole or freckle that wasn't there the day before, but so far, I seem unscathed. Whatever is happening to him is apparently not happening to me. So maybe it's not the mushrooms? Maybe this is the result of something else? I don't know. It is very hard to tell fantasy from reality at this point. I think back to how this whole trip started, me sitting in my fortified bunker back in Woody Creek just a few days after the New Year's celebrations, with dead peacocks everywhere and something dark and vaguely sinister prowling around outside my door. I wish I were back there right now, and who knows? Maybe I am. The thought makes me smile. Maybe I am still sitting there feeling burned out and pissed off, and this whole thing has been nothing more than a bizarre and vivid dream I had while in the depths of a whiskey binge. It's nice to think this might be so, but I know that it isn't.

“Turn left,” I tell Smitty after consulting the newspapers once again for the address of the firehouse. He does as he is told, which means that he is still useful and I shouldn't kill him yet. The big rig bounces up over the curb, nearly crushing a pay-phone booth. On the radio, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band are singing about Uncle Charlie and his dog, Teddy, and the song gives me a start. “What's this? What are you listening to?”

“The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band,” Smitty says. “It's country rock.”

“I know what it is,” I snap. “I was there when Gram Parsons invented the genre! But why are you listening to it? Don't you listen to Hank Williams and Charley Pride and Merle Haggard?”

Smitty shrugs, and the truck lurches off the curb and back into the street. “I don't know. I don't know anything anymore. I'm just tired.”

——

At the spaghetti dinner I realize that Smitty is right. Not about being tired, or the joys of country-rock music, or about the so-called gooks, but about the fact that most of the human beings I've been encountering lately are only crude mockeries of the sort of person that, say, an Aristotle would recognize as human. The pasta is terrible and starchy and clearly under-boiled, but the sauce—red with lots of meat, so Betsy demurs and munches on bread—is pretty good. Smitty eats with two forks and I keep an eye on the huge garage door, waiting for Haringa and his crew to make an appearance. All the fire trucks are parked out in the lot; Smitty's tractor-trailer is artfully placed on the lawn. If there are any police in Arkham, they must be owned lock, stock, and barrel by either the college or the mill, as they've not made an appearance despite the nine tons of evidence on display outside the firehouse.

A union representative—a big fire hydrant of a man who looks as though he eats other fire hydrants for breakfast—is speaking, half-ignored over the hubbub of quotidian family gossip and outright gawking and hissing at me. Apparently, there are some readers in Arkham after all, and the jury is still out on whether or not they are fans of my work. If I were a betting man, which I am, I'd bet they aren't. The union representative waits until the room has quieted down some and he has everyone's attention. Then he launches into a story. “One day all the parts of the body held a debate over who should be in charge of all the organs and systems of the body.” My journalistic antennae start waggling. Thank God the shrooms don't affect those. “The stomach says it should be in charge because it digests the food and provides the limbs with energy. The legs say that they should be in charge because they carry the body where it needs to go. The brain says it should be in charge because it makes all the plans. Then the rectum says—get this, you all; this is the important part.” He licks his lips. “
I
should be in charge. I'm responsible for waste removal. You know, like the Genovese family, here in town.” That gets a few yawps and giggles. “All the other body parts laugh at the poor anus, so, in a bad mood, he decides to just clamp shut and not talk to anyone. Soon enough the stomach is always upset, the legs start getting all wobbly, and the brain can't even think anymore, all because the waste keeps backing up into all of the body's various parts and systems. Finally, all the parts decide that the rectum
should
be in charge of the body after all, and forgiving them, the rectum loosens up and lets go. And the moral of the story,” the fire hydrant says, his smile now wide enough to eat a manhole cover, “is that somebody is always in charge . . .” He waits a beat. “And it's usually an
asshole
!” He erupts in peals of laughter, and the spaghetti chompers do likewise. Some of them don't even bother waiting to swallow. They laugh with pasta and red sauce hanging off their mouths, obscuring their jaws and chins, shaking in their seats at the utter cretin who ruined the perfectly wonderful anecdote by my old friend the Cretan. Suddenly, something inside me breaks.

“That's it! That's it! All hands on deck, now! This is not a fucking drill!” I rush to the buffet table and snatch up a pair of bread knives with serrated edges. Not the best tool for the operations I might need to carry out, but they'll do. “Are you ridiculous bumpkins deaf? Put down the forks, and slap your palms on the tables, now. It's time for a finger inspection!”

“Hey now, mister,” the man at the podium says, “You won't be finding any Cannocks here. This is Arkham, I'll have you know.”

“I know all I need to know about this town, you pestilent fist-fuck!” I rush the stage like a wave. That's the best thing to do when you find yourself drastically outnumbered. Forget going for the biggest and toughest guy; he'll cream your ass each and every time. Instead, hit the
loudest
one first, especially if he's by the door, which this particular doofus happens to be. I knock him right down, and he falls like a sack of potatoes. “We've got ourselves a new asshole in charge. Show of hands!” Everyone's confused. “Come on. We're not voting on anything in particular; just show me your hands!” And the hands go up, lefts and rights. Like automata these old workers are, recently displaced by the long waves of capital and the gambits of global chess masters, but still ready to do whatever they are told, and in unison too. It's no wonder my editor sent me here. The hands look clean, but the ward boss won't stay down. As he tries—unsuccessfully—to sit up, he bellows, “What do you people think you're doing? He's insulting us all! He's the one who came in here with an Innsmouthian!” And he points at Smitty, the moron, with his hands up and budding digits emergent on the sides of his hands. The silence becomes a murmur, and the murmur boils over. I drop the knives, rush to the door, and slam into it . . . only to then join the fire hydrant–shaped man on the floor.

Delirious. Dizzy. “That's a fire hazard! A locked emergency exit. If my attorney were still alive, I'd have him sue each and every one of you stump fuckers!” There are stars swirling before my eyes, billions and billions of them. My voice is disembodied, long dead, howling from light-years away. I wonder how much of it is from the hallucinogen and how much is concussion.

“We're at the fire station, you jerk,” some woman calls out. “The trucks are right outside, the garage doors wide open. What could possibly happen?” They laugh at me. “We hadda lock somethin'!” someone else says in a little kiddie-television voice. Then the door opens. Haringa enters, cross and determined.

“I thought we might find you here, Lono. Should I still call you that? Or have you dispensed with the pseudonym?”

“Listen, pal . . .” I begin but don't get to finish, because now Haringa is ignoring me. I hate being ignored, unless of course I wish to go undetected. He steps over me, as though to confirm the suspicion that I no longer exist, but the Nixon Youth shuffle in behind him, their clothing torn and dusty from Smitty's prior dramatic entrance. They don't ignore me. They jerk me to my feet, each one on a limb now, chains and tables not to be trusted, for I am filled with the spirit of Yuggoth. Haringa picks up one of the serrated knives and makes his intentions clear. He's going to pick up where he left off from before we were interrupted last time. It occurs to me that I don't know any other truckers, and that the doors to the fire station are wide open, so there's hardly any wall left to ram through, even if I did have another fungus-addled teamster on my side. Never have I needed lawyers, guns, and money more than I need them now.

Haringa helps up the squat little ward boss and then helps himself to the podium. He clears his throat professorially and, without even starting with a joke (“usually an asshole!”), he launches into his prepared remarks. At least, I imagine they are prepared. He has no index cards to read from, no notes to shuffle through, but the speech sounds practiced and rehearsed. It's not like the normal election-year speech, either. Oh, no. There will be none of that today. Haringa doesn't stop to reflect on the greatness that is America, makes no promises of prosperity, does not hold out the memory of historical excellence or the hope of future superiority for today's mediocrities to lash themselves to. Hell, the speech doesn't even reference Nixon. Instead, the professor just proposes a swap—the blue-collar union men and women will all become Republicans. The middle-class intellectuals will all become Democrats. It sounds good, on the surface, and I have to admit that I'm begrudgingly impressed. Haringa could have been a journalist, as he knows the secret to persuasive rhetoric: use the simplest possible words but aim your message for the most intelligent person in the room. That person, of course, just happens to be myself, but what Haringa doesn't know is that in a battle of wits, I am the A-bomb, and it's time for me to explode over his Hiroshima.

The two major parties “realigned” before, of course. Haringa tells them this, and he is right. Black Americans used to vote religiously for the Republicans as the Republicans were the party of Lincoln, and it was the Democrats under the white hoods of the Ku Klux Klan. The civil-rights movement of the last decade and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society put an end to that, although there are still a few skunks lurking about. Robert Byrd of West Virginia comes to mind. But Nixon was explicitly appealing to racism in his own election campaign, even as he shook hands with Chairman Mao (“Gook! Gook! Gook!” I hear Smitty's voice in my head again. We're still connected, if by interstellar distances. Damn it all, the mushrooms are still in my system. I thought their effects had passed. The galaxies swim in my eyes. There's just me, the strong hands of the Nixon Youth gripping my arms and legs, Haringa's buttery voice, and Smitty, him nothing but that long sigh at the end of the universe.) The problem with Nixon's switching, of course, is that intelligent people such as Haringa are far too intelligent to believe in racial difference or white supremacy.

“In fact,” Haringa says, “I know that our days are numbered. We're all being watched, manipulated. There is a secret player at work in this election, a force older than history itself, pushing and prodding us toward our destruction. But we can stop it; we can thwart it.” He goes on to explain how. Democrats and Republicans all have to unite, as one, while maintaining the impression of warring partisanship and ideological schism. Unite under Nixon, is what he obviously means, and thus, under the even greater evils waiting in the shadows, but Haringa stops short of coming to this logical conclusion. That might be a bit too much for the marks in the room to process. Better for him to appeal to them on more solid ground, speaking to their own hopes and fears.

Finally, he acknowledges my presence. “This fellow, for instance, is an example of what we face. He is a drug abuser, a writer for counterculture and music magazines such as
Rolling Stone
, a braggart who is casually incompetent with his firearms to the point of criminality, a man who cannot hold his liquor, a seeker of sensation and depravity of both the flesh and the spirit. And, worst of all, he's a
storyteller
.” The crowd gasps at this, dismayed. “Plato warned us about the poets, how they warp reality for their own despicable ends, rather than keeping their eyes and minds on reality. That's what this man, whose real name is most certainly not Uncle Lono, is doing. He's here on assignment. He told me so himself. He's been snooping around, asking questions and poking his nose where it shouldn't be, all in an attempt to make us look bad. You know his type. New York and California are full of them; they think they're too good for the rest of us. They think they need to make our decisions for us and tell us what to do, and how to behave, because it is in our best interest. Well, I say no more! We won't let this storyteller succeed, will we? It's his story of the election, his story of America itself, that threatens to overwhelm and erase all the hard work that each of you do every day of your lives. Please, please, hear what I am saying. This must be done. For your party, yes, but also, more importantly, for your families, your community, and your country.”

Then Haringa makes his mistake. He repeats “your country” once, softly, like the end of a sad prayer. And when he does, I get the giggles. You would too, I'm sure. So would anyone with half a brain between their ears. I get the giggles. I snort and chuckle. I even say it myself. “Your country. Oh, your country. Is it the United States, Maddy? May I call you Maddy, or do you prefer Madison? Or is it Professor Haringa? I bet that's what you want the little girls like Betsy to call you, eh? But never mind that right now. Is it
your
country, Haringa, or is it these United States of America? Oh, why not just ‘the Republic.' How about that? Has a nice sound to it, don't you think? It has a good beat and our forefathers could dance to it. I'm a storyteller, you say? You're wrong on that count, too, my friend. Bob Dylan is a storyteller, and he's very good at it. I am something else. Something different. I am a writer, by God, and I make my living with words. I use them like magic, but so do you. You do know how to spin shit into gold, don't you? Is that why you make almost forty thousand dollars a year and get to live in Swampscott instead of Arkham like the rest of these working stiffs? No, shut your mouth. Don't bother to answer because I have special powers granted to me by the high priests of Yuggoth, and I know what you'll say next. You'll pretend to be just like them, like the rest of us, and then you'll declare, ‘Anyone who opposes me is a rapist and a racist, a terrorist and an elitist, a communist and a socialist, a blue blood and a lowlife, a baby killer and the enemy of man.' That's the story, isn't it? Don't bother to deny it, Maddy. I am on to you and your kind. Here's the real deal . . . You need a fifty-state victory, or despite Nixon's power and wrath, your nefarious plans just won't come to fruition. Tell me I'm wrong.”