The Damned Highway (17 page)

J. Edgar Hoover is a rotten, perverse beast. Paranoia and corruption leak from his diseased pores, and yet he stays in power. Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson all considered dismissing him, but ultimately let him remain in power. He's been investigated, castigated, or censured by several House select committees and civil-rights groups, yet he always comes through unscathed. I'd admire the bastard's tenacity if not for him being such an obvious pig fucker. A man like that only stays in power if he has power to begin with. I have no doubt that Hoover's powers are great and vast and terrible, and now Smitty and his friends are asking me to rattle that cage and expose the truth? The offer is tempting, and the potential for fun and high jinks can't be denied, but it would also be dangerous. Only a fool would undertake such a risk, and I am such a fool. But to do so, I will need lawyers, guns, and money. And I also need to figure out how it all tied into Cthulhu, Moloch, Nixon, and the rest of the Happy-Fun Club.

The sun is up by the time I'm done, which means it's time for me to go to bed. Smitty puts me up in a ramshackle boarding house with a leaking roof and a porch that looks like it's about to collapse. The wallpaper is peeling, and there are veins of black mold spider webbing the plaster beneath. As far as I can tell, I am the only occupant, other than the bulbous-eyed clerk at the desk downstairs. I finish off the last of the whiskey and then lie down on the bed. I don't bother to undress, but I do kick my shoes off and throw them at Smitty, one at a time. The first toss misses, knocking over a broken lamp, but the second shoe hits him in the shoulder. Smitty tells me not to run off, and I've no doubt they'll post a guard of some kind, but I assure him that they don't have to fear. I am intrigued enough to stick around and poke my nose into things, and I am also expecting company. A California earthquake is about to hit Innsmouth. Where were you when the fun started?

——

There's a fat knock on the door and before I can even find a blunt object with which to brain whoever is outside, it opens and he is here. Five hundred pounds in an aging Nehru jacket, hair like a dead and burnt oak tree, wearing his standard-issue loud tie, elephant-trunk arms wide, reaching from one end of the room to another, for a hug. “Lono,” he bellows as he scoops me up like a child. “You're alive! You're fucking alive!”

“I'm not the one who's been faking my death, you fat bastard. Put me down!”

I get a kiss on each cheek before he puts me back on my feet, but his arms are still around me. “What are we doing in Innsmouth, man? This is a bad scene. As your attorney, I advise you to leave immediately and fly to Acapulco with me.”

“We can't go to Acapulco. The story is here.”

He picks his flowered attaché case with the Chicano Power sticker on it up from the floor and strides into the room, shutting the door behind him. “Don't you know what they do to outsiders out here? They filet 'em and use 'em as chum.”

“Where'd you hear that?”

“The fucking cabbie. I had to pay double the meter just to get him in the city limits. He didn't want to come. He said that everyone here has extra chromosomes, and brother, from the man behind the desk downstairs, I gotta believe him. There's bad karma all around here, man. What the hell are you doing in a place like this? These people don't even qualify as voting citizens, do they? Aw hell, don't answer that. I'll write my senator later. Let's get down to more important matters. Where can someone get a drink around here?”

“An excellent question. Let's hope this wasn't one of those awful Puritan beachheads back in the olden times,” I say.

My counselor snorts and mutters something about sailors and fucking the freshwater manatees. “This place should be swimming in grog.”

We head downstairs and find the front desk deserted. The counter is damp and the place reeks of seaweed and brine and mildew. My attorney sniffs, but it has nothing to do with the stench and everything to do with the small vial of cocaine he tucks back in his shirt pocket. “You bastard,” I screech. “Give me some of that. Don't hog it all.”

“As your attorney, I advise you to have a drink first.”

We wander out onto the empty street. I see no sign of Smitty or his truck and wonder where he could have gotten to. Sleeping with the fishes, perhaps, in the literal sense? Maybe his change is complete. If so, I wish him luck. He'll need it should Hoover come back and decide to finish the job he started here all those years ago. There is a small bar down on the first floor of the Odd Fellows lodge, open to the public and full despite the early hour. Apparently, this is where the inhabitants have all been hiding. We're issued drinks in the form of raw eggs cracked into icy beers. “ 'T's all we serve,” the bartender says. My request for my usual breakfast of coffee, whiskey, Heineken, and grapefruit juice is met with consternation, as if instead of ordering, I'd asked the barkeep if he'd like to sodomize Ray Coniff with Neil Diamond's hand. My lawyer pushes his stein back and orders a triple.

“Triple what?” the bartender says.

“Triple eggs, what the hell else!” the counselor bellows. What few tête-à-têtes were being held in the corner booths stop and a room full of bulging eyes and slurping, twitching lips turn our way, but my attorney gets his three eggs with haste.

“So,” I wonder aloud, “what candidate does the average Innsmouthian support, eh?” The locals aren't shy about answering the question for me. The sloped brows and haddock-white faces would suggest they are Nixon supporters, but I am surprised—McCloskey. The former marine turned peacenik Republican and Earth Day supporter? “That's t' one,” an old-timer, still mostly human, tells us.

“Well, he's not going to get the nod from the Republican bigwigs, so ultimately you're all for Nixon,” I say.

“Nope,” the old-timer says. His friends agree with him. Slow shakes of the head all around, and a few slobbering grins.

“Well then, who the hell are you going to vote for? Are you going to stay home? Shirk your civic duty! Do you know how many gooks I killed overseas so that people like you could roll out of your salt-encrusted waterbeds and vote!” My lawyer is already on his feet, his head nearly brushing the low ceiling of the bar. He may have been on the bench for a while, but he eases back into the job like a fish . . . or a Deep One . . . into water. “Dozens,” I moan. “Oh, those motherfuckers still haunt me. Their heads exploded, man! It was like a greasy teenager popping his goddamned pimples. That's how
easy
it was, and now you fish-stick suckers aren't going to vote?”

“We're votin',” the old-timer says, not impressed, “for McCloskey.”

“Why? Because you still have a hard-on for Hoover after what he did to your town? Wake up, man! That's no reason. Hoover stays in power no matter which party is in office.”

“Ain't got nuthin' t'do with him . . . much. Here in Innsmouth we don't vote for what we don't want.”

“Then you're not going to win!” As happens whenever my lawyer gets this way, I start casing the joint for blunt instruments, unclean steak knives, fire alarms, emergency exits, forgotten handguns, loose change, undercover cops, John Birchers who might be holing up for a drink, loaded for bear, and ready to legally shoot a brown person—even a brown person the size of my attorney.

“Aw, we'll win, all right. It'll be a wicked-close election,” the bartender says. “But we'll win. So why don't you settle down a fair bit, sir.”

“Close!” the lawyer spits all over the place, a rabid dog. “Bullshit! It's not going to be a close election. This country is going down one path or another—more and bloodier war, institutional paranoia, the triumph of cretinism! Or . . .” and then something happens that I'm not used to. He's stuck. “Or . . .”

“Or?” the old-timer says.

My attorney makes quick work of another triple-egg-and-beer shooter. That seems to help grease his wheels. “Or, if a Democrat wins, then we have a chance to end this war. We have a chance to really remake this country into—”

“A Great Society?” the bartender offers. Fishy, blubbering laughs percolate up from the floor.

“I know, I know.” He licks his lips. It's a game he likes, an argument he's had a thousand times before, with AK-47s pointed at him, over mounds of coke, in frantic precoital tumbling with those wool-stocking-wearing girls who still read
The Militant
. “But look at it this way. We're a two-party system and both the parties are capitalist parties, that's for sure. But one is the party of finance capital—that's the Republicans—and one is the party of industrial capital: the Democrats. So, think about your own interests. Are you a Wall Street bigwig?”

“Cain't say I um,” says the old-timer.

“But you probably depend on industry.”

“I depend on my god,” he says.

“You've got to see this god, by the way,” I tell my attorney. “I met him last night in the parking lot.”

“You got any more of that stuff, Lono?”

“I'm telling you, it happened, you swine! I wasn't on fungi from Yuggoth at the time. I had control of my senses.”

“Fun guy from where?”

“Never mind that.”

Then my attorney turns his attention back to the old-timer and the bartender and, with his voice loud enough for the rest of the bar to hear, says, “The point is this. You don't have to fight for the pigs that claim to be on your side, but you have to make sure that the other side doesn't win. The guy you're voting for, what's he going to do if he gets a delegate or two at the Republican National Convention? Nothing. He can't take that one delegate and transform Nixon's policy planks, and he certainly can't give that basset-hound bastard a personality, or a lobotomy. So what are you gonna do about it?”

“We're all votin' McCloskey,” someone says in the back. “We had some a them Arkhamites comes around here telling us different too, 'cept'n they were tellin' us to vote
for
Nixon. Say he's gonna win, but he needs to win it all to bring about the new age. Needs to win all a fifty states for it ta happen. Sumpin' ta do with numberology and such. Says fifty is a powerful number. Fifty brings 'bout the new age. Well, maybe we don't want no new age, and maybe we don't want no Moloch either.” At the word
Moloch
a general murmur rises up and the clientele stand as one and approach us.

“Why don't you all come outside with us,” says the bartender as he rounds to the front. He has a Louisville Slugger he picked up from under the bar, just in case we had other plans for the afternoon.

My attorney deadpans, “We're gonna play a little Cape Cod summertime ball, are we?”

“Now listen,” I say, jumping to my feet. “I'm here as an invited guest, and this man is my attorney. And even so, I'm more of a football fan than a baseball fan.”

“We'll make you one,” the bartender promises. “Got no need for yer kind round here.”

My attorney straightens up. He's a big man, but there's only one of him. “Stand down, Chesty,” I tell him. “These are a peaceful bunch, except for the occasional ritual murder.” He's not convinced, but we are surrounded, so we're back out to the parking lot and not by choice. The locals follow us through the door. The old-timer has three dozen eggs with him, taken from the bar. Unceremoniously, he dumps them off the edge of the parking lot and into the water, where they sink. Despite the season, the water hasn't frozen over. Gulls circle overhead, shrieking as they dive-bomb the offering like Japanese kamikaze pilots.

“Holy shit,” my lawyer says, “those eggs just sank! Eggs don't fucking sink.”

“Yes, they do,” I say. The circle of Innsmouthians around us all agree. Yes, yes, of course they sink. Haven't you ever boiled an egg? If eggs didn't sink, ducks wouldn't come ashore to lay them. All that folksy garbage. Having met a Deep One yesterday, I'm pretty calm, despite the fact that all I have to level myself off—now that the shrooms are out of my system—is half a beer and most of a raw egg, and the whiskey I drank last night. But I'm not ready for what happens next.

The water begins to boil and churn and steam, and from it emerges a huge webbed hand, one larger than the hands of the Deep One I saw the night before. It moves away from the edge of the parking lot, but then a massive, fleshy dome emerges. For a moment I fear losing control of my bowels; is it the top of a giant head? No, a huge, distended belly. Then the rest of her—yes, her—with two pendulous and fleshy tits—no, four of them—emerges. A Deep One, gigantic, the size of a tugboat, floats on her back, her four engorged breasts flopping, her arms wide and extended like an infant reaching for a hug from the sun and sky.

“Mother Hydra,” the locals say, not quite in unison. They're religious but still have minds of their own. Once again, I am overcome with a sense of kinship, the same as I felt for Smitty, even after the bastard kidnapped me with a flare gun. I could get to like these Innsmouthians; maybe because they're not all that human after all. And my lawyer, he's entranced, as well. I haven't seen the bastard like this since he fell in love with the girl behind the counter at the taco stand in Vegas. That didn't end well, and I don't think this will either. He steps forward.

“Oscar!”

“Holy mama,” he says. “This is why you called me here, Lono.”

“Huh?”

“I'm gonna do this lady right,” he says. “I'm gonna show her a good time.”

He takes another step, then a third, then flings out his own arms wide and lets himself fall off the lip of the parking-lot jetty and down into the slimy embrace of Mother Hydra. He lands softly on her stomach like it's a California king–sized bed in an expense-account hotel room, and together they sink back into the briny waters of the shore.