Read Online The Damned Highway by Nick Mamatas - Free Book Online

hands are huge—like someone took a cookie cutter to a baked ham. “I’m a member of the silent majority.” A chatty little bastard, nevertheless, he is, though I choose—wisely—not to mention this.
    â€œListen, boss, I am a professional writer. What’s this all about? I have little time for one of Nixon’s stooges. I can talk to the old man himself, any time I wish to,” I say, and I believe it.
    â€œYou think we’re insane, but we’re not. It’s that gang on the other side, the Democrats. You and all those long-haired intellectuals are thinking of voting for them, and you don’t even know who you’re voting for yet—”
    â€œThat’s the democratic process. We’ve come a long way since ward heelers and the animated dead shambling toward the ballot box.”
    â€œSo you think!” Mac says, his voice shrill again. “So you think! But you’ve read the Berkeley Barb , you’ve checked out the East Village Other . The Reds have it right, but backward. They think both major parties are the tool of capital—industrial capital for the Democrats, and finance capital, well, that’s supposed to be us.”
    Mac waves his hot-dog fingers at the diner. I notice for the first time that it has cleared out. Fear squeezes my heart. My bus is gone. Even the vending machines are unplugged. My sandwich has turned stale and green. For God’s sake, how long have I been sitting here talking to this madman? I wish for a moment that the rest stop had a jukebox and that the jukebox had Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man”—one of my all-time favorites—because something is happening here, but I don’t know what it is, do I, Dr. Lono?
    â€œBut,” he continues, “you already know we serve another Master. You were very adept at figuring that out. What you don’t get, my friend, is who the Democrats serve.”
    â€œOh yeah, who’d that be?”
    â€œMoloch!” Mac shouts. I think he’s about to break into a recitation of “Howl”—had the world shifted so far to the left that even that angry old poem was being repurposed for the Nixon campaign? But no, Mac has something more Biblical in mind. “You have lifted up the shrine of Moloch and the star of your god Rephan, the idols you made to worship,” he says. “It’s all in the Good Book, and I don’t mean The Naked and the Dead . You know the Nam was always Kennedy’s war, and that rat bastard from Texas who had him killed—”
    â€œWhoa, whoa, LBJ killed—”
    Mac waves my words away. I find myself unable to speak. Juju, bad juju, swims in the air. “For whom do children die in fire? For Moloch. And you shall not let any of your seed pass through Moloch; neither shall you profane the name of your God: I am the Lord.”
    â€œWait, wait, who is the Lord in your equation? You’re not making sense, man. And what’s this about LBJ? He had Kennedy killed?”
    Mac leans forward. “And had sex with the bullet wound while the corpse was still fresh.”
    I find my voice. It’s a proud American voice. “That’s obscene. Granted, I’ve known Kentuckians and Puerto Ricans who would do such a thing, but—”
    Mac shrugs. “He needed some way to occupy himself onboard Air Force One while they were sitting around at Love Field Airport in Dallas.”
    The sugar shaker is still in reach if I need it. I debate reaching for my Moleskine. It’s in the kit bag, along with my other weapons, but I’m afraid that if I did, Mac would lunge forward and suck the eyeballs out of my head. Instead, I repeat everything back to him, trying hard to get it down in my own mind. “So Kennedy started the Vietnam War as a child sacrifice to the hungry goat god of the Phoenicians, and you Republicans are just a bunch of happy Quakers looking to reclaim America for