Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede, Bradley Denton [libby ebook reader .txt] 📗

paused to think. A smart person would have inserted his contact lenses and peeked out between the curtains to see what was going on. A smart person would have put on his pants.

“Oliver,” Mother once told me, “you are sensitive, sweet, and loving, with good taste in music, but you will save yourself a lot of trouble if you remember that what you are not is smart. No reflection on you. It’s genetic.”

I was out in the forty-degree air and down the stairs before the dumpster had stopped vibrating. It was only as I stepped on an especially sharp bit of gravel halfway to the dumpster that I stopped and noticed my situation.

It was cold. I was nude. The sole of my right foot was stinging. An enormous out-of-focus man with wild red hair and a beard to match stood beside the dumpster. His features were blurry, but it was obvious that he was looking at me fiercely. He was wearing a Harley-Davidson cap and oil-stained overalls. As I squinted at him, he reached into a bib pocket and pulled out a crescent wrench much like the one I keep on my coffee table.

All I had with me was the cigarette-burned towel. “Get away from my bike,” I said, twirling the towel into a rat tail, “or I’ll snap you into a coma.” I was hoping to make him think I was crazy. Even accomplished fighters hate to mix it up with lunatics.

The big man glanced behind the dumpster. “I wondered who belonged to this,” he said in a voice corresponding to his size and hair. He looked back toward me. “Go put on some clothes, boy. I ain’t gonna hurt your machine. I was screwin’ around in the salvage yard, and I had to hop the fence when I saw the bike. A six-fifty Ariel is rarer than a disease-free fuck with a porno queen.”

I was nonplussed.

“Well, go on,” he said, gesturing toward the motel with his wrench. “Don’t just stand there with your dick shrinking.”

I took a few steps backward, then turned and began to wrap the towel around my waist as I walked.

The obese motel manager came around the corner of the building before I had covered my crotch. She was too far away for me to see her expression, but her scream told me all I needed to know. I began sprinting for the stairs, and she spun and ran, thinking I was after her. Indecent exposure and attempted sexual assault were about to be added to the list of my crimes.

As I charged up the stairs to number 15, I heard the red-haired man’s laugh. It was the sort of laugh elicited by The Three Stooges and Wile E. Coyote. It was the sort of laugh that said, Oh, sweet Jesus, am I glad that isn’t me! I couldn’t hold it against him.

I jabbed my contact lenses into my eyes and yanked my clothes on, not even pausing when I saw that my briefs were inside-out and backward. I was imagining the progress of the motel manager’s phone call to the El Dorado police and estimating their response time. As I zipped up the Moonsuit, I decided that I had a slim chance of making it out of town if Peggy Sue started right away.

Peggy Sue never started right away.

I clattered down the stairs, pulling on my helmet as I went, and ran to the dumpster. The red-haired man’s crescent wrench was back in his pocket, and he stuck out an open hand as I approached.

“Boog Burdon,” he said.

“A pleasure,” I said, touching his hand as I dashed around him to my bike. The Ariel was nosed into the narrow space behind the dumpster, so I would have to roll her out before trying to start her.

“Couldn’t help but notice the Shawnee County tag,” Boog said. “You the dude Buddy Holly mentioned on the Today show this morning?”

“That wasn’t the Today show,” I said, wrestling Peggy Sue out backward and turning her to face the access road.

“Well, he was in that fuckin’ time slot,” Boog said.

I mounted Peggy Sue, opened the fuel valve, and began jumping on the kick starter. “I’m not responsible,” I said as I jumped. “I didn’t bring him back to life or send him to Ganymede, I swear it.”

Boog took out his crescent wrench again. I screamed a string of nonsense syllables.

“Shut up,” Boog said. “I’m just gonna take off your goddamn license plate.”

I stopped kicking. “Huh?”

Boog moved to the rear of the bike, squatted, and fitted his wrench to one of the bolts that held the plate to the rear fender. “Radio says various fuzz are after your ass, and if this bike don’t draw their attention, the tag sure as shit will.” He squinted up at me. “You’re kind of stupid.”

“It’s genetic,” I said, and jumped on the starter again.

“Sit the fuck still,” Boog said. “Soon as I get this off, I’ll start the bitch. I remember her.” He scowled. “Christ, what’d you do to the left exhaust? Let an alligator suck on it?”

I remembered now that Peggy Sue had been owned by “Boog’s Hog Works of El Dorado” before being purchased by the old guy from whom I’d gotten her. “It was bitten off by a dog,” I said.

“A fuckin’ lesson for us all,” Boog muttered, grunting as the license plate came free. He twirled the bolts back into the empty bracket and stood, flinging the plate over the truck skulls into the heart of the salvage yard. “Soon as you can, swipe an out-of-state tag,” he said.

Then he nodded in the direction that he had thrown the plate. “Coupla old dead Indian cycles in there. Can you fuckin’ believe it? Nobody knew they was there until they hauled out some DeSoto bodies yesterday and found ‘em underneath.” He shook his head. “Poor old bastards ain’t much but rust now.”

A siren shrieked in the distance.

“You said you could start my bike?” I asked.

Boog turned back and gestured for me to get off. Reluctant but desperate, I dismounted. He got on and kicked the starter a few times, harder than I could, but Peggy Sue still refused to start.

The siren was getting louder.

Boog whanged on the fuel valve and carburetor with his crescent wrench. I began to like him.

“A bike gets old, crap flakes off in the tank,” he said as he whanged. He didn’t seem to have noticed the siren. “You gotta start using better gas, make sure you don’t get none of that alcohol junk, and change the filter screen a couple of times a year. It’s like when people get old, they’re supposed to eat more broccoli and bran flakes, but their asses get clogged up anyhow so they gotta take Ex-Lax.” He stopped pounding, then gave the starter three King Kong-class kicks, twisting the throttle hard.

Peggy Sue roared. Boog dismounted, letting the engine idle down, but stood in my way as I tried to take his place.

“They ain’t here yet,” he said, “so give me a fuckin’ minute. You’re heading south, right?”

I nodded. “I’ve got to get to—”

Boog thunked me upside the helmet with his wrench. “Don’t tell me where you’re going. If the fuzz ask me, I want to say I don’t know. Now listen up: Head west on fifty-four and blast through the first five stoplights. At the sixth light, hang left. That’ll get you out of town quick. It turns into a country road that’ll take you clear the fuck to Winfield, and from there it’s less than twenty miles to the state line.”

He moved aside, and I got onto the bike. “You hand out silver bullets too?” I asked. I would have sped away then, but he still had a hand on the handlebars.

“That ain’t the way it is,” Boog said. “I got no altruistic impulses.” He looked off toward the heart of the salvage yard. “But I was seventeen when that goddamn plane went down. Maybe a guy young as you don’t know what that means. But the first time I ever felt really good, I was listening to ‘Oh, Boy.’ I stripped down and rebuilt my first bike listening to ‘Tell Me How.’ I got to home plate with my first chick listening to ‘Maybe Baby.’ “

“I understand,” I said, and maybe I did. He was the same age as Mother would have been.

“You owe me now,” Boog said, fixing his eyes on mine. “You owe me, and you’re gonna fuckin’-A pay me back.”

Should have known, I thought. “How much?”

He scowled. “Fuck that.”

The siren was no more than a half mile away now. “What, then? What?”

Boog took his hand off Peggy Sue. “Help him,” he said, and stepped back.

I sat still for an instant, thinking that I should say something. Then Peggy Sue went into gear and we ripped past the motel, spraying gravel all the way out to U.S. 54.

As we accelerated westward, a wailing patrol car passed us heading in the opposite direction. In my mirrors, I saw it swerve into the driveway of the FIFTY-FOUR MOTOR INN REASONABLE RATES. I cranked the Ariel’s throttle and ran two red lights. The next four were green. We turned south.

The town gave way to bare hills and dead trees, and a mile from the turn we passed an oil refinery. White tanks like humongous aspirin tablets hulked along the east side of the road, and in their midst stood a complicated tower, all pipes and girders and incomprehensible shapes. A smoking yellow flame burned at its apex, making the thing look like an inverted starship. This was the source of El Dorado’s distinctive smell.

Less than a quarter mile past the refinery, the ramshackle screen of a drive-in movie theater stood with its ribbed back turned to the road, displaying a white marquee with red letters that spelled SKYVUE. On the dead grass between there and the ditch, satellite dishes sprouted like cockeyed mushrooms. A sign leaning against one of the dishes read “SkyVue Drive-in Theater and Earth Station Emporium/Theater Closed for the Season/Buy a 200-Plus Channel Dish to Cure the Winter Blahs/All Antennas Built on the Premises/Inquire at Snack Bar.”

I let up on Peggy Sue’s throttle. I was driving past the place from which Mother had ordered the dish that had relayed Buddy Holly’s image to my Sony. My chest felt hollow. My head hammered as if with sympathetic vibrations.

I didn’t know how or why, but the SkyVue Drive-In Theater and Earth Station Emporium was important to my quest. I downshifted and hit the brakes.

I had just begun the left turn into the theater’s driveway when I glimpsed a car with flashing red and blue lights approaching fast from the city. It wasn’t using a siren, and it was still far behind, but I was sure that the Authorities inside had seen me.

I leaned back out of the turn, and Peggy Sue accelerated hard, nearly jerking me from the seat. Boog and his crescent wrench had done a good job. If the Authorities behind us were locals, they would have to give up soon because we would be out of their jurisdiction. I hoped.

My attitude had changed from that of a law-abiding citizen to that of a law-breaking fugitive in less than a day. “It’s so easy,” I told Peggy Sue, amazed.

SHARON

Notes on client Oliver Vale, continued…

2/3/89; 6:22 P.M.: I gave myself the day off and have slept almost seven hours, so I’m thinking more clearly than I was in the early morning. I believe I know what to do.

I have an advantage over the authorities who are searching for Oliver. I know his