The Damned Highway by Nick Mamatas Page A

everyone’s lips. Nixon has a secret plan to end the war, so he says, and the people I’ve met actually believe it. Nixon had a secret plan to end the Negro menace, and that was understood to have been said only between the lines, said with secret words filled with secret meaning, and the people I’ve met actually believe that as well. Worshipful, trembling lips, eyes swimming with blood and honor: “Nixon will do it. He will, he will. We believe in him. Nixon will bring change. Nixon offers hope.” Hope and change are what the people want. The last few years have been tough—war, assassinations, unrest, bell-bottoms, the demon weed, and colleges full of unrepentant Marxists—but Nixon is finally going to set things aright. History is on the man’s side. Lizard-brained LBJ scuttled back under his rock in disgrace, didn’t he, “after trying to buy off the coloreds,” as one precocious nine-year-old named Annalee puts it. Her curls are mathematically perfect and her voice soulless. She is going with her grandpa to Ohio “to start a new life.” Grandpa sleeps heavily near the front of the carriage. As he snores, his dentures rattle in his mouth. LBJ is gone, vanished into the ether. Haven’t all other obstacles to Nixon’s ascension been handled so easily? Even a blood-soaked mobster like Joe Kennedy couldn’t protect his kids, and then Martin Luther King was shot too, the Vietcong were just violent enough to keep their names in the papers, hemlines went absolutely crazy, everyone was tuning in and turning on, and angels wept. Nineteen seventy-two is just a bump on the carpet. Nixon will smooth that bump. Clean sweep, it will be a clean sweep. A fifty-state victory, and even the mongrel Puerto Ricans will agitate for statehood to make it an even fifty-one. An even fifty-one! That’s what the heifer of a waitress says as she slams down a slice of blueberry pie, prefrozen but warmed on the spot, in front of me at one of the rest stops. Whatever New Math she learned, it doesn’t make much sense . . . Was her geometry even Euclidian? Was there even such a thing as non-Euclidian geometry? As I eat the pie, juice leaking from it like dark purple ichor, I have visions of cities full of abandoned buildings with angles like something from a bad mescaline high. But never mind that. Hasn’t Muskie already been seen broken and crying, weeping like an ugly woman? The many-fingered hand of Nixon is surely behind it all. That’s what I’m told over and over again, and this is not something the housewives and bums and button-down young men I met on this bus trip view with any sort of suspicion at all. Not dread but glee. They are feverish and eager, their palms and loins wet with anticipation. All save one.
    I meet my first Cannock at that same rest stop. He’s made me somehow, in the manner of his secretive yet perceptive people. “Uncle,” he calls me, “glad to see you here. I dig your work, especially your stuff for Scanlan’s and Rolling Stone .” There is no fooling him, I see, so I decide to confide.
    â€œKeep it down,” I say. “I am undercover and behind enemy lines. Call me Lono.”
    â€œThat’s cool. You were Lono before, though you didn’t know it, and will be again.” He was drinking tea in his coffee and licked his lips wildly. “It’s all pretty interesting, what’s been going on, eh?”
    I know what I need to do now: nod and occasionally grunt in a manner the Cannock will perceive as interesting and affirming. That’s three-eighths of the journalist’s trade right there—know that the crazies want to talk, and they especially want to talk to a reporter, and they especially want to talk to a doctor of journalism and fellow brain-damaged geek, for which I qualify in spades.
    â€œThey say,” he murmurs, glancing around to make sure no one is eavesdropping on our